On Spirit Photography

The history of Spirit Photography is almost as old as photography itself. It will be William Mumler who will change the way the world felt about the paranormal. He will do what mediums of his day couldn’t do, he provided physical proof of an afterlife through the use of a relatively new invention, the camera. The true birth of photography is 1839 with the invention of the metal-based daguerreotype process developed by William Henry Fox Talbot. The process is slow, requiring minutes, but produced a sharp image. And with this new technology came the demand for portraiture. No longer were hours required for a painting that may have cost a small fortune, when a photograph could be taken in minutes requiring a fraction of the cost.

The birth of Spiritualism in the 1840s and then the emotional trauma from the Civil War changed the face of photography forever. Photography, was a wealthy person’s hobby. You couldn’t just buy a camera, they were so rare they were usually ordered. During the time of the war, cameras brought the ugliness of war to the masses with war correspondents bringing along photographers to capture the carnage of the battlefield. Mumler, a jeweller by trade, took full advantage of the situation by using his new toy. Mumler claimed that he was taking a self portrait and when it was developed, he saw a ghostly image of a relative who has passed several years before. And he could do this with other people as well. Customers came from all over the region to get their photo take in hopes of seeing a specter sitting or standing beside them. Mumler was charging up to ten dollars for these portraits, which doesn’t sound like much but that’s almost three hundred dollars by today’s standards. He didn’t even guarantee a spirit in every photograph, but he claimed he was a gifted medium and the camera itself was a tool of the Great Beyond.  Soon, other photographers got onboard this paranormal gravy train. Wives asked for their deceased husbands and vice versa. Mothers asked for deceased children. The 19th Century was a time of industrial change and innovation, but it was also a time of disease, war and accidents that came from the Industrial Revolution. There wasn’t ever a shortage of clientele. But probably the most famous of these spectral portraits is that of Mary Todd Lincoln, a devout Spiritualist. It will be the last portrait ever taken of her, and the pained, weary face of this First Lady is secondary to the image of a ghostly Lincoln standing behind her, with his hands resting on her shoulders. This will be Mumler’s masterpiece. It will also be his undoing.

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