William H Mumler created what is known as the First ‘Spirit Photograph.’

Spirit photography, as it sounds, is a type of photography that tries to capture pictures of the spirits of dead people. It became popular in the mid-19th century, shortly after photography was invented. William H Mumler was one of the first people to take spirit photographs. 

Many people believe that spirit photographs are evidence of the existence of the spirit world or the afterlife. Spirit photography was popular from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century.

The First Spirit Photograph that William H Mumler, who was a jewelry engraver and amateur photographer, created was apparently taken accidentally when he shot a double-exposure image. Later, it turned out that he took a picture of himself in 1862 that also showed the spirit of his dead cousin standing behind him.

According to The New Yorker, regarding the photo as a curio, he began to pass it around, garnering astonishment and acclaim from the city’s thriving spiritualist community. As word spread, Mumler’s hobby became a lucrative business, and soon he was taking spirit photographs from dusk till dawn, summoning lost loves beneath his skylight, and dispensing solace to a public addled by the rising death count of the Civil War. His images retain their intimate, macabre tint even now.

The Man Who “Captured” Lincoln’s Ghost on Camera

The Guinness Book of World Records reported that some of Mumler’s most famous photos include Mary Todd Lincoln with the spirit of her husband, Abraham Lincoln. According to the book Ghosts Caught on Film, the photograph was taken around 1869. Mumler supposedly didn’t know that the spirit in the photograph was Lincoln and did not realize who it was until the photo was developed.

Controversies 

The GWR refers to a History article and mentions that Peter Manseau, curator of American religious history at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, says Mumler was a fraudster but admits he did not know how the photographer managed to pull off his hoax.

“It was a genuine religious movement that meant a lot to people at a time when the nation was going through mourning and loss like it never had before,” Manseau said in the article.

According to the history article, there was a case where Mumler created a spirit photograph for a woman who had recently lost her brother in the Civil War. Eventually, her brother returned home, but rather than accusing Mumler of fraud, the woman blamed it on an evil spirit trying to deceive her.

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Earlier this year in Stockholm, Elton John performed the final concert in his five-year Farewell Yellow Brick Road world tour, bringing down the curtain on one of the most successful music careers in history. Yet anyone expecting the global superstar and hugely influential activist to sink quietly into the oblivion of retirement is badly mistaken.

This week, the Victoria and Albert Museum announced the biggest photography exhibition in its history, to open next May, and drawn entirely from the collection of Sir Elton and his husband, David Furnish. Comprising 300 works by 41 artists, it not only features some of the most iconic images in the history of the medium, but announces John as one of the most significant collectors of the post-war era. “Everything [in my collection] has been chosen by me,” Sir Elton told The Observer in 2016. “My curator will suggest stuff, but nobody goes and collects on my behalf. I’m not known for my restraint, but for me this collection is about love, not collecting for the sake of it or grandstanding.”

Certainly, as you’d expect from a singer-songwriter whose trademarks include diamond-studded glasses, diamond-studded jackets and diamond-studded, well, everything, John never does things by halves. He began collecting photography in 1990 after successfully entering rehab following a 20-year struggle with cocaine addiction. He now has 9,000 works in his possession – a number that dwarfs that of many major museums – and which require the services of a full-time director. In 1993, he set the then record price for a single photograph when he paid £112,000 for Man Ray’s Surrealist masterpiece Glass Tears.

Alex Spear

On Tuesday night, Bowdoin welcomed Deborah Dash Moore, a professor of history and Judaic studies at the University of Michigan, to a crowded Kresge Auditorium as this fall’s Harry Spindel Memorial Lecture.

Since 1977, the Spindel lectureship has brought Jewish artists, writers and academics who study Jewish topics to Bowdoin. Dash Moore, a historian of American Jews, spoke at this year’s lecture about her most recent book, “Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Midcentury New York,” which examines photographs taken by working-class Jews in twentieth-century New York City.

For roughly an hour, Dash Moore spoke about the photographers and photographs she explores in her book to a group of students, faculty and community members, many of whom were photographers or Jews themselves.

Dash Moore explained how the development of photography and subsequent dissemination of relatively low-cost cameras afforded Jewish New Yorkers new opportunities to explore the city that they previously did not have, equipped with the power of a camera.

“A significant cohort of these young Jewish men and women embraced photography and its possibilities,” Dash Moore said. “A camera’s basic documentary potential presented an intrepid New Yorker with a world of challenges: how to see—how to review—the street and make sense of its traditions and its occasional outbursts of chaos with their urban smarts and small cameras.”

Dash Moore then shifted her focus to discussing the specific photos taken by Jewish photographers Morris Engel, Sid Grossman and Helen Levitt, among others. She discussed the gendered dynamics of photography, specifically in relation to the male gaze, and the skills that made a good photographer, including “luck and pluck, patience and skill.”

The photos Dash Moore examined included photos of New Yorkers watching other New Yorkers, New Yorkers gathering at restaurants and storefronts and New Yorkers at Coney Island. Many of these photos included groups of younger city dwellers gathering in a way the urban elite at the time didn’t appreciate.

“Reformers have long observed city people loitering on busy corners, hanging around in candy stores and bars and drinking soda pop on stoops and have passed a judgment that most of which is, ‘this is deplorable,’” Dash Moore said. “Photographers disagreed. They often pictured these groups, rarely presenting them in a threatening or negative light.”

Many Bowdoin students and faculty members enjoyed the event, including Senior Lecturer in Environmental Studies and co-chair of the Spindel Lecture fund, Jill Pearlman. Pearlman’s pedagogy focuses on architecture and urbanism, and she serves as one of the advisors for the Urban Studies minor.

“You can’t understand the urban landscape of New York without factoring in the Jews,” Pearlman wrote in an email to the Orient. “The impact of the Jews on the urban landscape has been felt in many ways.”

Pearlman also discussed factors behind bringing in Dash Moore, including relevance of her work to current Bowdoin course offerings, namely her own “City, Anti-City” course and Professor of Art Michael Kolster’s documentary photography seminar.

“Because of that, we knew we would have an engaged (and captive) audience,” Pearlman wrote.

Elias McEaneney ’27, a student in Pearlman’s “City, Anti-City” course, enjoyed how Dash Moore’s talk blended history with art.

“One of the biggest things I took away from the lecture was a glimpse into what it’s like to try and analyze history not from a purely scholarly lens,” McEaneney said. “I found myself viewing these photos the way I would view them as an artist as well, incorporating context and my understanding of the principles of art into the greater understanding of the photos.”

Not a great deal is known about Carlo and Luciana, it seems. They came from Vignola, a small Italian city near Modena and not far from Bologna. They married and honeymooned. Carlo worked as a clerk in a hardware store and Luciana worked as a tailor. They retired. They spoke only Italian. They were childless. Luciana died first, Carlo several years later.

When they had the opportunity, they liked to travel. And travel they did – to China, Cuba, India, Thailand, the Red Sea, America and beyond. The reason we know so much about their holidays is because of the photo albums they made, filled with the portraits they took of each other, always pictured in exactly the same spot.

Their pictures are the subject of an exhibition in Bologna, part of the city’s Foto/Industria festival, by curator and self-styled “photographer without a camera” Erik Kessels, a longtime curator, editor and repurposer of amateur, “found” and vernacular photography.

For more than 20 years Kessels has been riffling through once precious, now unwanted, photo albums, finding the work of amateurs who, as he puts it, “without them knowing, make a beautiful narrative or document of their lives, sometimes with lot of mistakes, sometimes in a very beautiful way”.

He often makes his finds in flea markets, or by buying online, or occasionally through more direct contact. “Sometimes a person rings my doorbell with a bag of albums, saying: ‘I won’t live that long any more and I want you to have them.’ Mostly it’s not interesting, of course,” he laments.

“I have around 15,000 family albums that I have bought over time, and 99% of those 15,000 are fucking boring. They are really horrible because they are only landscapes or waterfalls or boats or cars.”

On this occasion, Sergio Smerieri, a studio owner and neighbour of Carlo and Luciana’s who had helped the couple print and compile their photos, brought the work to his attention. Kessels, always looking for personal documents to use as working material, was undeterred by the prosaic content. “There are still a lot of stories to tell behind existing or mundane images,” he says.

Carlo and Luciana began travelling, by motorbike and later in their Fiat, when they were young, and when snapshots were black and white. By their mid-20s, though, it appears that work commitments curtailed their activities. Certainly they took no photos until their retirement 40 years later. Then their package holidaying began in earnest. “They started again,” says Kessels, “they travelled all over the world, and always did the same trick.”

With the couple’s adherence to a rigid pictorial protocol and a deadpan systematicity, their pictures could be mistaken for those of a pair of itinerant conceptual artists. Kessels concedes that is one way of viewing the work, but he stresses that for a couple travelling alone, “this was purely practical for them. That’s why I quite like it.

“Carlo and Luciana had no children. They didn’t do this as an artistic act – they just did it out of practical reasons. Of course there were no selfie sticks or other ways of making the picture. He took a picture of her, and she of him in the same spot, and then they put them next to each other in the album so they have, in a way, one image with both of them in it.”

For Kessels, presenting the pictures in a new context offers an opportunity for them to be re-evaluated. “Just by taking them out of their context and putting them in a book or an exhibition, people start to look at them differently. I didn’t crop them; I never do anything to the colour; I never retouch them. In my case the edit is important. How to exhibit it is like my act of reappropriation.”

As part of his reimagining of the holiday snaps, Kessels takes pains to include the 40-year hiatus that interrupts the albums. He displays blank panels in the exhibition, and 40 white pages in a book of the work. “The beautiful thing in this case is that there are 40 years without any image and that is quite special,” he says.

One reason the dual portraits hold such appeal for him is that they predate the era of selfie sticks, social media and filter apps.

“In a way that’s also what I’m interested in. I mean nowadays maybe people are much more aware of what they do because we grow up now in an image culture. With a mobile phone and its images you are very aware that you can be quite artistic, or that people have seen there are certain ways of doing things that are interesting.”

Not so for Carlo and Luciana.

And, unlike the original albums which were arranged by country and dated, he is reluctant to include caption material. He prefers, he says, “to try to make people pause, to look at the images first, and slowly maybe imagine your own story”.

“I’m always searching in people’s very mundane albums for very specific stories. I’m almost like a visual archaeologist,” he says. “Sometimes the images are quite clear and the narrative is quite clear. Sometimes I need to look at it and digest it and wait and see before I get the idea of ‘OK it’s about this.’ That is the nice part of it – it’s a puzzle sometimes.”

Carlo and Luciana is on display in Bologna as part of the Foto/Industria festival until 26 November.

Carlo and Luciana, edited by Erik Kessels and Sergio Smerieri, is published by Kesselskramer.

This interview was made possible with the assistance of Foto/Industria

Black and white photos: check! Beautiful street photography moments that look timeless: check! Leica: check! A printed set of photographs with no advertising interruptions: checkmate! Photographer Phil Penman is no stranger to being featured in our online magazine and sharing compelling tales. His latest book, entitled New York Street Diaries, is a deep dive into the work that he’s done over the years. In many ways, this book is soul food for the street photographer.

To understand how this book is soul food, you must dive into who Phil is. Phil Penman is originally from Britain and came to America many years ago. He’s a former press photographer, and these days is mainly known in the world for his street photography work. Browse through his website, and you’ll see that he’s created several beautiful photos. But it’s in this book that you truly start to see where and how he stands out from several others. And for $50, this book is a worthwhile investment into your growth as a photographer.

“I wanted to do a truthful portrayal of a time in our history that I hope we never have to see again,” says Phil to the Phoblographer when asked about his inspiration for the book. “From the shadowy underbelly of the homelessness and grittier NYC to the beautiful serenity of walking through the snow at night. We all have our own vision of New York, and this is mine.” He continues to state that while some think that the graffiti streets are an eyesore, it’s part of what makes the city so beautiful and unique to him. This vision is holistically seen throughout the book.

To truly savor this book, I sat down and enjoyed two glasses of nice whiskey. It’s similar to what you’d experience when you go to hang out at a meetup of photographers geeking out about their prints or something. You typically hang out, and then you get into the mode of looking at the images. These rituals are often much more fun together with someone else.

All of Phil’s photographs are black and white — and in this way, one can see him as a modern archetype for the genre of street photography or black and white work. Page through the book, and you’ll spot incredible photographs that will satisfy several camps of photographers. Fine art photographers will appreciate how Phil plays with light and contrast in his photographs. Street photographers will adore how he captures people through a lens that doesn’t at all seem like a colonial eye to the people of New York — but as a sincere admirer. And most importantly, most of the photographs aren’t split down the middle of the page break. Instead, the images are placed in a way that we can clearly see them, or they’re just vertical images that you want to stare lovingly at.

Truly, looking through the book shows you that Phil is in love with New York for what it was and what it is. I mean, isn’t this the kind of love story that we want to know about and that we yearn for? Wouldn’t you want to be holistically loved for what you are? And more importantly, wouldn’t you want to have that expressed about you? We think of New York in a way that is sometimes scoffed at. And I admit that even as a native New Yorker, I’ll scoff at parts of the city that bring me sadness for various reasons. But I also accept that those parts have also, at one time, brought me happiness. Through Phil’s book, you see nothing but admiration portrayed in a classic retelling of the modern landscape of the city and its people.

While I adore the fine art images that Phil makes, I don’t think that they’ll be the most riveting ones to people who buy this book. Phil’s best work arguably showcases people and moments that we otherwise just don’t see.

Do yourself a giant favor and get your hands on this book. And more importantly, read the text inside. It’s big enough that even someone with failing eyesight can read it easily.

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