SEEING THINGS.(The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, exhibition)

Spirit photography, which flourished between the late eighteen-sixties and the nineteen-thirties, was an exercise in blind faith and outrageous fraud. The Civil War in the United States and, a few years later, the Franco-Prussian War, in Europe, had decimated most of a generation, and photographers, responding to the desire of survivors to reconnect with the dead, found a way to bring them together on film. With the aid of some simple darkroom trickery, sitters for conventional studio portraits could be made to share the frame with the transparent figure, disembodied head, or smoky silhouette of a dead husband, wife, child, parent, or pet, and by the end of the nineteenth century thousands of these keepsakes had been printed in America and Europe. Spirit photographers, some of whom claimed to be able to capture not only the spirits of the dead but also the thoughts and dreams of the living, were exploiting more than the public's naivete. As "The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult," an exhibition of more than a hundred and twenty photographs at the Metropolitan Museum, makes clear, within a few decades of the invention of photography its practitioners understood the camera's power as a tool not just for capturing reality but for manipulating it.

Skeptics, including members of the nascent Spiritualist movement, challenged spirit photographers' methods--most of which involved elementary forms of double exposure--and took them to court. Yet some photographers were compelled by a belief in the hereafter, and clients were so comforted by the images that they often refused to accept evidence of fakery, even when the photographer confessed to it. In the eighteenseventies, Edouard Isidore Buguet, the first and most successful French spirit photographer, had a studio on the Boulevard Montmartre, where the business of traditional portraiture was supplemented with what one journalist called a "little industry turning out ghosts"--some fifty apparitions a month. Buguet's success attracted the attention of a policeman who, after sitting anonymously for a portrait, arrested him for fraud. Before his trial, in 1875, Buguet admitted to double-exposing his prints and conceded that he had no powers as a medium: "I am just a photographer with more or less skillful tricks." He was sentenced to a year in prison and fled to Belgium, but his clients considered him a martyr for the Spiritualist cause.

Visitors to the Met's show might wonder what the fuss was about, though they will be thoroughly entertained. The nine Buguet photographs mounted together in the exhibition's first gallery are obvious fakes, but so are the other images in the room. Many look like ordinary fleamarket cabinet cards and cartes de visite--hand-sized portraits of stolid men and women in waistcoats and crinolines--except that ghostly figures float above the sitters' heads or hold them in a transparent embrace. Yet who could mistake these spectres--which included not just dead relatives but departed celebrities like Napoleon III and Balzac--for anything other than scrapbook cutouts trailing yards of chiffon? In the same gallery are five "anti-spirit" self-portraits, which Buguet made after his trial, satirizing his deceptive techniques and ridiculing his clients' beliefs. In one, he levitates a cane-bottomed chair. In another, he holds the hand of a wraithlike skeleton whose bearded face resembles his own. In the most elaborate image of the series, he sits at a table peering into an open book while a recumbent female apparition floats behind his head holding a medallion that states, "The chosen ghost is guaranteed. . . . Invisible manipulation carried out in front of the client." Buguet's spoofs, like other pointed satires included in the show, are more artful than the work they mock--animated by an evident ...