Reviewed by TimTrain

A photographer operating in Boston and New York during the 1860s, William Mumler provided a questionable service: he would photograph clients in his studio, and present them with portraits in which they were accompanied by semi-visible spirits. Mumler's clientele included many of the richest and most famous of Americans—one portrait has Mary Todd Lincoln seated in front of her dead husband, Abraham—were limited to about four a day, and were sold for as high a price as they could get. He was eventually taken to court by the editors of the New York World newspaper, who were aided by the Mayor of New York City.

The documentary material relating to Mumler's career in The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer is fascinating, bemusing, beautiful, technically adept, groundbreaking, and instructive; but it is hardly strange. There is very little that is really strange about the case of William Mumler, for there is probably no artistic medium in the world that has not been used deceptively for the purposes of personal gain. In a twisted way, the case of Mumler is reassuring, for it demonstrates the ease with which a technically-savvy con-man with a can-do spirit can make use of the photographic medium to gull credulous fellow citizens into giving him money. And Mumler's pictures were most assuredly fakes; anyone who has watched a Hollywood film is aware of how easily a picture can be manipulated to produce an illusion.

In The Strange Case of William Mumler, editor Louis Kaplan has compiled a collection of press clippings, photographs, personal biographies of Mumler, along with the criticism the man received from contemporaries (including famous showman P.T. Barnum), and on the whole makes a good show of editorial impartiality. Kaplan claims in his introduction to be interested in the ability of spirit photography to 'construct meaning and value as well as to provoke controversy'; he argues that this 'does not involve affirming or debunking the truth claims of spirit photography…' (4). But the romantic account—a twenty-first century ghost story—hovers in the background, like the spectre on the cover of the book.

The book itself is written in the wake of a successful exhibition of Mumler's photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and seems to be deliberately structured like a series of museum exhibits. The pictures from Mumler's photographic practice are labelled and cross-referenced within source material that is quoted at length. There are engravings done in imitation of Mumler's work (86), (154); an example of political satire, with photographic material provided by Mumler (66); and, fake spirit photographs compiled by the appropriatetly-named Abraham Bogardus in order to give the lie to real spirit photographs (196).

The spirits themselves in Mumler's photograph, for all their artificiality, seem to have a will of their own. They are seen strumming the instruments held by their living relatives (190), showering spectral flowers on their shoulders (Plate 3), or leaning on the lap of their estranged mother in prayer (88). Subjects appear accompanied with spirits who may never to have lived in the first place; medium Fanny Conant appears in the company of her favourite spirit, ' Vashti', an Indian child—sure enough, bearing feathers about her head (111). In several disturbing pictures, spirits appear bearing the photograph of a living person, rather than that living person themselves; it is as if they have become more substantial than the living, more real than reality (41 & 148). And indeed, Mumler and his clients are really interested in the spirits, the real subject of the photographs; paradoxically, the presence of dead people give life to otherwise dull nineteenth-century portraits.

What did people see in the spirit photographs? Largely, they saw what they wanted to see, and pointed out to others what they wanted to be seen. A mother recognises a dead child by the length of his ears (151). Mumler claims to take a spirit portrait of one gallery owner and find the devil's hoof hanging over the man's head (85 - 87). P.T. Barnum, meanwhile, relates the story of a sister of a Civil War soldier who, assuming her brother to be dead, goes to a spirit photographer—probably Mumler, though he is not identified as such in Barnum's book—for a portrait. The photographer complies, and when she later discovers that her brother is still living, "she simply remarked that some evil spirit had assumed her brother's form in order to deceive her" (67).

Appropriately, in these accounts of a man who claimed to be able to photograph ghosts who were beyond life, larger-than-life figures such as P.T. Barnum should appear. In newspaper transcripts of Mumler's court case, both Abraham Bogardus and Barnum give eloquent testimony, the first objecting that one spirit portrait is "a transparent lie, the shadow on the sitter being on one side, and the shadow on the spirit being on the other" (193). Of course, if normally invisible spirits can be seen in photographs, one can only assume they will have shadows!

Barnum, meanwhile, encounters rigorous cross-examination in the court on some of his own show-business claims:

I have never been in any humbug business, where I did not give value for the money; these spirit photographs were labelled "humbug" on the walls of my Museum; the woolly horse was a remarkable reality and curiosity; it was exactly what I represented it to be, having a peculiar form and curled hair; it was exactly a woolly horse; it was not a horse "woolled over"; the horse was "born" exactly as he was when exhibited in my Museum, and there was nothing artificial about him (195).

What is the difference between Barnum's flamboyant showmanship and Mumler's business? Barnum seems to have exaggerated the truth deliberately, to have created a fiction for the audience while pointing out that it was a fiction; perhaps Mumler lacked this self-awareness.

It does seem a pity that Kaplan does not really reflect more on how the Mumler photographs were made. It does not harm Mumler's career now, almost 150-years on, to point out that he was faking it. That small caveat aside, this is an entertaining and instructive compilation of material relating to the Mumler case.

The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer
(2008)

by Louis Kaplan
University of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816651573
288pp US$24.95