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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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...
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