The Merchant's House Museum presents a new exhibition featuring historic and modern images, including 19th century spirit photographs from The Burns Archive and other collectors alongside current works by Sally Mann, John Dugdale, Hal Hirshorn and RA Friedman.
The first "spirit photograph," taken 150 years ago, in 1861, by William Mumler, was hailed as visible proof of the existence of the spirit world. Throughout the 19th-century, people were fascinated by the idea of communicating with their loved ones after death, for emotional consolation and assurance of the continuity of life - a fervent desire that gave rise to spiritualism and mediumship of many kinds. People soon lined up to sit for photographic mediums, in hopes that their dead friends and relatives would appear on film - as one hopeful sitter wrote, "showing us our dear one clothed as he now is, in his spiritual body, as on the other side." Despite Mumler's trial for fraud in 1869 (charges were dropped) and skeptics who claimed it was done with double exposures and manipulated negatives, spirit photography continued to be taken seriously into the early 20th century.
Modern artists working with early photographic techniques are today's medium photographers, channeling the past to capture atemporal scenes, images from an alternate world. The processes they use, such as pinhole exposures, collodion/wet-plate negatives, and salt printing, encourage strange, and beautiful, anomalies, evocative of spiritual presences. From Sally Mann's haunting Civil War battlefield landscapes to John Dugdale's excruciatingly tender portrait of a couple in the midst of the AIDS crisis (the only event in living memory whose physical and emotional toll mirrors that of a 19th-century epidemic). From Hal Hirshorn's evocative salt prints recreating the 1865 death and funeral of Seabury Tredwell, to RA Friedman's transcendental light paintings.
Also on display will be eerie "spirit" photographs taken by amateurs and visitors in the Merchant's House Museum, "Manhattan's most haunted house," according to The New York Times.
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