Looking for Transcendence
If the spiritual, even loosely defined, is a realm beyond the actual, then photography’s relation to it is bound to be complicated. Picturing the spiritual must either go through the actual, or somehow slip around it. In this sense, photography is, like us, straddling the cold facts of immediate existence and loftier ideals. This might be why the spiritual in photography regularly teeters between the sublime and the ridiculous. Strain too hard for metaphor, symbolism, or transcendent feelings, and it can easily fall flat, humiliated for taking on ideas above its station. Forty years ago, the critic Rosalind Krauss called it photography’s “problem of fraudulence.”
The most obvious fraudsters were the spirit photographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They played the medium’s sobriety against its easy way with delirious tricks, claiming to manifest everything from specters to the living dead. It’s hard to imagine anyone falling for those hokey ectoplasmic emanations leaking from mouths and eyes, but fall they did. The well of human credulity is deep, especially in moments of psychological crisis. Spirit photography tended to find its strongest reception among the traumatized, bereaved, and emotionally needy, which is why it was so popular in the wake of of a ghost.
