PUBLIC LECTURE: 'Where are the dead?' Spiritualism, photography and the Great War

Abstract:

The modern spiritualist movement, which began in the United States in the 1840s and experienced a major efflorescence during the Great War, was contemporary with the invention and popularisation of photography. Many techniques, including lighting effects, lantern slide projection, flash lighting and combination printing from glass plates, were common to both spiritualist and photographic practice: lantern slide shows and lectures were sometimes advertised as ‘lantern séances’. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the literature of modern spiritualism and psychic research is saturated with the language of photography. In 1920, defending the celebrated English medium Daniel Douglas Home against accusations that he faked phenomena by conducting a séance under cover of darkness, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle rightly observed that ‘some material manifestations need darkness. The ectoplasm, which is the substance out of which these things are built, dissolves in light. It is like developing a photographic plate’. It is perhaps more surprising, though, to find that the language of spiritualism still haunts some of the most sophisticated writing about photography. In Camera Lucida, for example, Roland Barthes describes the photographic image as ‘like the ectoplasm of “what-had-been”’.

The present paper is work in progress from Professor Robert Dixon’s ARC funded project on Australian photographer, writer and film maker Frank Hurley, several of whose most famous images of the Great War include ghostly ‘extras’.

All are welcome.