Susan Hiller

Modernism and photography developed alongside, and in relation to, each other. But at its mid-nineteenth-century start, the field of photography split, one side documenting so-called reality, courting humanism, emphasizing the centrality of human beings, and the other courting spirits. Spirit photographers documented women whose recently dead husbands’ faces “emerged” from their bodies. Ironically, the same chemicals that produced logical results also produced ghosts.

The imagery of Susan Hiller’s (1982–2018) originally (1972–76).