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Ectoplasms, Evanescence, and Photography

Karl Schoonover
Published online: 07 May 2014.

To cite this article: Karl Schoonover (2003) Ectoplasms, Evanescence, and Photography, Art Journal, 62:3, 30-41

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2003.10792168

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10 FAL L 1001
 Bearing a striking Introduction
resemblance to the
Edison/Dickson 1894 During the first decades of the twentieth century, spirit photography received its
Kinetoscopic Record
of a Sneeze, this 1913 harshest critiques from the mainstream press in Europe and the United States.
cinematograph pur- In the midst of this controversy, a new and supposedly more material genre of
ports to depict both
the ectoplasm's extru- spirit photographs gained notoriety: ectoplasms. These bizarre images portray
sion from and its grad- female mediums in varying degrees of displeasure: painfully lactating, vomiting,
ual retreat back into
the medium's body.
or otherwise leaking stringy webs of white excrement that often contain pictures
of faces. Spiritualist investigators alleged that these ectoplasmic excretions-or
"teleplasms"-were the material byproducts of spirit activity. In the photographs
purporting to document this phenomenon, a violent parable of image produc-
tion unfolds, as invisible forces wrestle with a human medium, causing a sub-
stance from her insides to discharge through her orifices and serve as a conduit
for a visual message from the spirit world. Against the precedent of the emotion-
less, stiff, and formal spirit-photo portraits of the nineteenth century, ectoplasm
Downloaded by [University of Kent] at 09:47 24 November 2014

Karl Schoonover
Ectoplasms, Evanescence,
and Photography
I would like to thank Lloyd Pratt, Rosalind Galt.
JeanWalton, Mary Ann Doane, and Jane
Marsching for their insightful critiques and
suggestions.
photography and its corporeal imagery appear shocking and outlandish even
today. Why, in a period of intense scrutiny and public dismissal of spirit photog-
raphy, did leaders of the spiritualist movement embrace this
extreme and grotesque phenomenon? Why did images that
sought to defy the apparent truth of mortality by documenting
spirits concern themselves with the earthly, material, and
deeply mortal body? And if the ectoplasmic excretion process
serves as a figuration of image production, then what does its
exaggerated corporeality say about the nature of photography?
Ectoplasms were invented in the twentieth century's first
decade and reached their widest mainstream popularity just after World War I.
With this new phenomenon, we find the spirit photograph radically trans-
formed: ectoplasm imagery both celebrated and borrowed from recent advances
in camera technology. Furthermore, the peculiar content of ectoplasm pictures
appears to anticipate a shift in popular understandings of photography by
exploiting two interrelated ideas about the medium. First, these images accentu-
ate the camera's ability to record what is otherwise too fleeting for eyesight to
register fully. Second, they attribute the documentary strength of the photograph
to its indexical nature, the physical connection it shares with the world it repre-
sents. The corporeal character of ectoplasm photographs exemplifies the unparal-
leled sensitivity of photographic registration, while at the same time allegorizing
the very physical nature of that registration. On the one hand, the agitated and
expressive body of the human medium demonstrates the camera's unique ability
to capture the contingent. On the other hand, that same body enacts the indexi-
cality of photographic representation, staging the physical process by which
visual evidence of the spiritual world ends up in a photograph.
To be clear, my claim is not that ectoplasm photographs are more indexical
in nature than any other photographs, nor do I wish to declare indexicality as
the ontological essence of all photographic representation. Rather, in what fol-
lows, I will examine how ectoplasm iconography exploits a rhetoric of indexi-
cality and how its extraordinary figuration of the photographic process may
suggest the preeminence of indexicality in public conceptions of photographic
realism in the first decades of the twentieth century.

J I art journal
 Typical nineteenth-
century spirit-photo
portraits, published in
Georgiana Houghton,
ChronIcles of the
Photofrof'hs of
SpIritual BeIngs and
Phenomena InvisIble
to the Material Eye
(London: E. W. Allen,
1882).
Downloaded by [University of Kent] at 09:47 24 November 2014

32 FA l l 2003
 Spirit Photographs without Spirits
Ectoplasm images-and the theory of photographic representation they propose
-bear almost no resemblance to nineteenth-century spirit photography. \ Early
spirit photographs rarely portray the psychic medium at work; these images do
not seem to require a professional human channel to produce apparitions. Instead
the camera serves as "medium" in both senses of the word, not only rendering
the image of a person posing for a portrait but also materializing the impression of
a ghost hovering above. Like most photo-portraits of the day, nineteenth-century
spirit photographs de-emphasize the body.The rigidly posed human subject, usu-
ally dressed in formal attire, rarely displays emotion or movement and appears
either unprovoked by the apparitions or unaware of their presence. 2 The ghosts
themselves have little effect on the mortal world, seemingly unable to disrupt the
human subjects or disturb other elements in the mise-en-scene. By contrast, ecto-
plasm photographs depict a human medium in the throes of violent struggle with
Downloaded by [University of Kent] at 09:47 24 November 2014

an invisible entity.These images focus not on capturing a spirit's image, but on

I. Rolf H. Krauss provides a comprehensive
documenting its physical impact on the body of a female psychic. 3
history of spirit photographs in Beyond Light and Another stark contrast arises from a comparison between the camera's meta-
Shadow: TheRole of Phatography in Certain Para-
physical role in nineteenth-century spirit photographs and its role as a highly
normal Phenomena: An Historical Survey, trans.
Timothy Bill and John Gledhill (Munich: Nazraeli perceptive observer in ectoplasm photographs. This difference, I will argue, indi-
Press, 1995). cates a shift in the cultural status of the technology. In the earlier examples, the
2. The lack of either affect or motion in these
early spirit photographs reflects both an adher- ghosts needed the photographic process to become visible. But despite serving
ence to middle-class propriety and the limits of an as the primary conduit for the apparitions, this process remained shrouded in
early photographic technology that required sit-
ters to repress expressions or poses too difficult mystery. Neither the images, nor their producers, nor their proponents offered
to maintain for seconds on end. any explanation of how ghosts ended up in pictures. Therefore, to have accepted
3. If the exaggerated gestures of an exposed
female body underwrite the material character of
these images as real was to grant photography a supernatural agency since the
the photograph, then gender presumably plays a ghosts only appeared via the mysteries of its technology"
crucial role in ectoplasm iconography, especially
The ectoplasm phenomenon implies a different conception of photography,
considering the multiple references to childbirth in
both the written accounts of ectoplasms and the valuing the camera less for its paranormal powers than for its mechanical exten-
images themselves. That mediums were submit- sion of human Sight. Photography no longer flaunts its independence from
ted to not only the ever-watchful gaze of the
male scientist and his camera, but also routine, the laws of physics; it simply reveals the truth of the material world in sharper
extensive body searches suggests that ectoplasm detail, much like a stronger prescription for eyeglasses. Since ectoplasmic excre-
investigation enacts a clinicalsuspicion of the
female body that resonates with other scientific tions are not ghosts per se, the camera's role in the phenomenon was not to cap-
and quasi-scientific research of the period. In this ture spirits but to witness human contact with spirits, record the manifestation
current abridged version of my argument, the
role of gender in these images must remain a
in action, and document its fragile byproducts. Rather than elide their means of
question for later elaboration. production, ectoplasm photographs go to extraordinary lengths both to capture
4. Before the popularity of spirit photography,
materialization in progress and to emphasize the physical nature of photographic
spiritualists manifested ghosts largely via
seances-sessions in which a medium, usually representation. In fact, their allusion to the photographic process so excessively
female, served as a channel for spirits. Although indulges a corporeal spectacle that it endangers the plausibility of the very phe-
seances remained popular throughout the history
of the movement, nineteenth-century spirit nomenon of spirit photography. Consequently, we find ectoplasm photographs
photographs-and their ability to invoke spirits addressing an audience for whom the dramatization of indexical registration
without a human medium--<:an be seen as an
attempt to remove female mediums from the does more than any other discourse of realism to legitimate photographs as
public profile of spiritualism and displace their documentary evidence.
power within the movement. Ann Braude
addresses the changing status of women within
spiritualism in Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and
Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America Highly Responsive Phenomena
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); see also Alex
Owen, TheDarkened Room: Women, Power. and In his essay "Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations," Tom Gunning
Spiritualism in LateVictorian England (Philadelphia: explains how photography's uncanny ability to create a double-an exact
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990).

JJ art journal
 Four photographs of
ectoplasmic produe-
tion from Geley's
experiments in the
late 19105.
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34 FALL 2003

Downloaded by [University of Kent] at 09:47 24 November 2014
5. Tom Gunning, "Phantom Images and Modern
Manifestations: Spirit Photography, MagicTheater,
Trick Films,and Photography's Uncanny," in
Fugitive Images: From Photogrophy to Video, ed.
Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1995),42-71.
6. Paul Virilio notes a concordance between spirit
photography and advances in the science of light.
War and Cinema: TheLogistics of Perception, trans.
Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989): 27-30.
For a different approach to similar issues, see
Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence
from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, N.C. :
Duke University Press, 2000).
7. A contemporaneous critique also finds ecto-
plasms providing an all-too-convenient solution to
the spiritualist debates, explaining how "the strug-
gle to obtain harmony [within the spiritualist
movement] gave birth to a combination of the
two theories and the present'ectoplasm' theory."
James Black, "Ectoplasm and Ectoplasm Fakers,"
Scientific American 127, no. 3 (September 1922):
162-63.
8. For a complete account of these changes see
A New History of Photography, ed. Michel Frizot
(Cologne: Konernann, 1998).
likeness-disoriented and unnerved its nineteenth-century viewers.s For this
reason, the first generations to view photographs endowed the new technology
with a supernatural dimension as much as an apodictic clarity. All spirit pho-
tographs, according to Gunning, exploit this duality, trading on both the super-
natural and evidentiary affinities of the photographic image. Despite the radical
changes that ectoplasms brought to the iconography of spirit photography, he
maintains that the conceptual foundations of these twentieth-century images
remain faithful to those of their nineteenth-century predecessors, In my view,
the emergence of ectoplasm photographs is better understood in the context of
photography's expanding technical faculties and changing social status at the
turn of the century, as well as alongside concurrent debates within spiritualism.
By reimagining photography's role in generating evidence of supernatural phe-
nomena, ectoplasm images mark a shift in the discourses of photographic repre-
sentation away from the camera as mystical conjuror and toward photography
as keenly sensitive registration process.
Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, spirit pho-
tographs responded to a continual onslaught of dismissals from photographic
experts, scientists, and journalists. As these debates intensified, the content of
such photographs actually anticipated critique with greater and greater savvy. The
later images reflected a nexus of collaborative discourses, continually revised over
decades of spiritualist debate: spirit photographers responded to earlier debunk-
ings and competed with other contemporary hoaxes for outside verification;
supporters devised sympathetic tracts to legitimate existing images, while simul-
taneously proposing improved methods of photographic mediumship and imag-
ining further photographic experiments to forward the cause of spiritualism.
Since many spirit photographs relied upon camera tricks, their creators
were required to stay abreast of public knowledge about the mechanics of pho-
tography, inventing and reinventing phenomena that anticipated and exploited
changes in popular conceptions of photography as a medium. For example,
growing scientific evidence of the physical nature of light presented a problem
for spiritualists who regarded spirits to be immaterial. 6 Since spirit photographs
had become a major part of spiritualism's public profile, debates external to the
movement about visual technologies and the materiality of light became highly
relevant to internal debates over the spirit's substance. If ghosts appeared in pho-
tographs, and if photographs were dependent upon the physical nature of light,
then perhaps they, the spiritualists, had mistakenly assumed spirits to be immate-
rial and had misapprehended the autonomy of the spirit and mortal worlds.'
At the same time, in the decades leading up to the ectoplasm phenomenon,
the increased sensitivity and mobility of the camera had radically redefined
photography as a medium, significantly increasing its practical applications
and expanding its role in everyday life." Shorter exposure times enabled shoot-
ing in low-light situations, freed the camera from its tripod, and, along with
smaller, lighter camera bodies, allowed greater flexibility in placement and
mobility. The development of rapid shutter technology, the invention of cinema,
and the improvement of flash technologies further extended the range of the
camera's sensitivity, allowing it to capture movement as more than just a blur,
Incidental, natural, and as yet unseen movements were suddenly within the
grasp of recording.
35 art journal

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9. Charles Richet, Les Phenomenes dits de
Materialisation (Paris: Annales des Sciences
Psychiques, 1906); Gustave Geley, Clairvoyance
and Materialisation: A Record of Experiments,
trans. Stanley De Brath (London: Unwin, 1927);
Baron von Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of
Materialisation: A Contributionto the Investigation
of Mediumistic Teleplastics, trans. E. E. Fournier
d'Albe (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner,
1920).
In this historical context, twentieth-century spirit photographers were
faced with two challenges: first, to reconceive the visibility of spirits as material
enough to register on photographic film and, second, to recast the role of the
camera in the phenomenon so as to emphasize the increased sensitivity of its
registration and downplay its earlier function as conjuror, a role now associated
with fraudulent trickery. The ectoplasm phenomenon was a revelation for early-
twentieth-century spiritualists because its inventive scenario answered these two
challenges: spirit activity gained a visible materiality, but this materiality was so
fleeting and fragile that only photography could verify its existence.
By the time that ectoplasm images peaked in popularity, the cultural status
of still photography had changed as dramatically as its technology. Once the
nearly exclusive domain of professionals and a few wealthy hobbyists, photog-
raphy was now fully accessible to the amateur, and the camera had quickly
become a household item in many middle-class families. The explosion of ama-
teur photography at the turn of the century-propelled by the availability of
inexpensive pocket cameras and Kodak's promotion of the snapshot-marked a
democratization of the technology and granted growing numbers of people first-
hand experience with the photographic process. Meanwhile, the expanding use
of photography in many spheres of public culture-including medicine, journal-
ism, criminal justice, and legal documentation-brought an unprecedented
proliferation of the photograph to daily life. Historians continue to debate the
impact of these fundamental technological and cultural changes on popular per-
ceptions of photographic representation. Comparing nineteenth-century spirit
photographs to ectoplasm images contributes to this debate, especially since the
latter appear to address an audience more familiar with the mechanics of pho-
tography than mystified by them.
Photographic Proof and the Evanescent
Most, if not all, paranormal phenomena were preconceived hoaxes. To disguise
this fact and meet the expectations of an increasingly science-savvy public,
twentieth-century spirit photographs needed both to reference contemporary
science and to mimic its methods of investigation and data collection. In ecto-
plasms, spiritualism's need for objective verification and mainstream recognition
resulted in an extraordinary spectacle of pseudoscience. Almost from its start,
this phenomenon included the presence of a "skeptical observer," and several
well-known scientists eagerly stepped into this role. In the first two decades of
the twentieth century, ectoplasm images were created, collected in volumes,
and promoted by three prominent research physicians: Charles Richet, a French
scientist known for experiments on the physiology of laughter, who would later
receive the Nobel Prize for discovering anaphylaxis; Gustave Geley; and Baron
Albert von Schrenck-Notzing. The accounts of Geley and Schrenck-Notzing
were translated into many languages and published internationally, in France,
Germany, Great Britain, and Spain, among other countries. Both texts were
widely circulated in the United States."
In his nearly 350-page book recounting five years of ectoplasm research,
Schrenck-Notzing boasted of having developed the most scientific method for
collecting evidence of spirits and of having created a grand "psychic laboratory"
36 FALL 2003
 Ectoplasm emerges from
an unseen portion of the
medium's body Into the
hand of Schrenck-Noaing,
1911.
Downloaded by [University of Kent] at 09:47 24 November 2014

unprecedented in the history of spirit photography. He claimed that ectoplasms

were nearly impossible to observe without the aid of the very latest surveillance
equipment, including state-of-the-art cameras and newly improved magnesium
flash technology, among many other special devices. For Schrenck-Notzing,
this bevy of photographic equipment also bolstered the "scientific" character
of his method and insulated his laboratory from impropriety: "Registration
should, of course, be made independent of the sense organs, which are
subject to deception, and should, as far as possible, be transferred to physical
apparatus." '0 Schrenck-Notzing initially outfitted his studio with five cameras,
including two stereoscopic cameras, and wired them to photograph an event
simultaneously. He later added four more cameras, raising the number to nine
and insuring that his studio contained a large audience of mechanical eyewit-
nesses. According to Schrenck-Notzing's methodological notes, his synchronized
cameras allowed the same event to be recorded from various angles and dis-
tances, and thus provided the outside evaluator with the assurance that no post-
seance doctoring of the image had occurred. Later configurations of his studio
resulted in "cinematographs,' revealing a clinical fascination with movement and
gesture borrowed, if indirectly, from the experiments of Eadweard Muybridge
10. Schrenck-Notzing. 21. and Jean-Martin Charcot.

31 art journal

A likeness of President
Woodrow Wilson appears
in the plasma expelled from
areas below the waist of the
medium, 1913.
Downloaded by [University of Kent] at 09:47 24 November 2014
II. Schrenck-Notzing. 276.
12.Geley quoted in Hamlin Garland. Forty Years
of Psychic Research (New York: Macmillan Co..
1937).262.
In their documentation of the material impact of spirits, ectoplasm pho-
tographs appealed to scientific positivism and tailored themselves to contempo-
rary advances in photographic technology, which could now capture fleeting
events, instantaneous involuntary movements, and the most impermanent phe-
nomena. Once the ectoplasmic substance materialized, Schrenck-Notzing and
Geley claimed, it survived intact for only an instant, making physical handling
and inspection of the phenomenon impossible in all but
a few cases.
[Since ectoplasms] appeared with lightning-like
rapidity, and might disappear in the fraction of a
second, we must reckon with the fact that these
transitory structures do not hold out under our
physical contact, and that the suggested procedure,
while yielding no success to the observer, has grave
consequences for the medium. In any case, the
material does not seem to withstand the light. ... II
It is mobile and timid.... It is sensitive to the light,
and strong rays cast upon it give pain to the psychic.
It has an immediate, irresistible tendency to orga-
nize itself ... It is ephemeral, yet capable of appear-
ing solid and permanent. 12
Much like unexposed photographic paper, an ecto-
plasm was ruined when flooded with white light and
could only be seen, if briefly, under red lamps similar to
those used to illuminate darkrooms. So evanescent was
the excretion that only photography could guarantee
seeing, examining, and preserving it. But at the same
time that the camera captured evidence of the phenome-
non, the photographic process almost always caused the
ectoplasm to disappear, since the light of the flash would
trigger the plasma's deterioration or quicken its retreat
into the body of the medium. In other words, the tech-
nology that secured a lasting material record of the
ghostly manifestation also eradicated the physical phe-
nomenon itself, reducing any material evidence of spirit
activity to a mechanical tracing.
As if to underscore the centrality of photography to this phenomenon,
spiritualists purported to discover pictures within the oozing plasma. In these
instances, the ectoplasmic excretion becomes a spirit photograph within a spirit
photograph, imbuing the latter-the photograph that documents the excretion
process-with a figurative self-reflexivity. Put another way, ectoplasmic material-
ization enacts the photographic process, manifesting a visual "theory" of mechan-
ical representation that designates photography as a technology sensitive enough
to arrest the evanescent and register the contingent. In producing the image,
photography both supplies a record of this fleeting moment and eradicates the
possibility of that moment's repetition.
]8 FALL 2003

Ectoplasm extrudes from
the breast of a medium,
1913.
Downloaded by [University of Kent] at 09:47 24 November 2014
13. Researchers insisted that restraining the medi-
ums and revealing otherwise private areas of their
bodies were necessary to protect against fraud
and to allow the camera full visual access to the
ectoplasmic manifestation process.
14. Late-nineteenth-century efforts to make visi-
ble the instant at which death takes over life also
suggest a fascination with photography's new-
found ability to capture the contingent and make
visible the otherwise invisible. For a discussion
of death and early cinema see Mary Ann Doane.
The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity,
Contingency. the Archive (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press. 2002).
The Burdened Body
Ectoplasm formation-the process that grants the spirit world a material or
iconographic existence--appears to have had traumatic effects on the female
mediums, as indicated by their contorted postures and tense writhing. While
earlier forms of mediumship sometimes involved a performance of the body-
including the acting-out of tremors, twitches, and shak-
ings induced by spirits as they passed through the chan-
nel's body-these phenomena were rarely photographed
in the nineteenth century. Moreover, ectoplasms took
"physical mediumship" to a new level of corporeality,
simulating a violent visual drama in progress.
The spectacle of the female medium in pain-a body
often tied down, exposed in various stages of undress,
or both-threatens to overshadow the curious display of
flocculent ectoplasmic oozings and their iconographic
content. 13 The excretions seem stagy, suspiciously resem-
bling common household products, such as cotton gauze
or tissue paper, hastily printed with images. Even propo-
nents wrote that the plasma looked less than credible,
especially in comparison to the indisputable graphic
dynamism of the violenced body.The admitted implausi-
bility of the excretions as visual evidence suggests that the
images depend upon other means of corroborating them-
selves and the phenomenon. In this concluding section,
I want to argue that the photograph's ability to catch the
medium's body in the midst of uncontrollable trauma
confirms the veracity of the images in three distinct ways.
First, the body in the midst of pain-the individual
overcome with inadvertent and uncontrollable impulses-
operates as a guarantor of the image's authenticity. The
photograph captures and stills the body in motion, fixing
a gestural spasm in a frozen pose difficult to recreate or
fake and seemingly outside manipulation. Rendering the
graphic precision of technology through the contingen-
cies of the body grants the image, and photographic rep-
resentation in general, an aura of truth. 14
Second, if the ectoplasm photographs provide a figuration of the photo-
graphic process itself-representing camera, developer, enlarger, and print
processor via the human body (as Gunning affirms)-then the imposition of
the body's insides on the body's outsides suggests a particular version of this
process. The corporeality of ectoplasm photographs, therefore, reinforces the
referentiality of photographic representation in a more figurative sense: it enacts
the haptic confluence of the referent (or spirit), the site of image production
(or the medium's body), and the pictorial message (or ectoplasmic substance).
As the above passages from Schrenck-Notzing and Geley indicate, even after
its extrusion, this albuminoid matter was a living extension of the medium's
body. As such, the plasma had the ability to draw energy from the medium or
19 art journal
 cause her pain. In metaphorical terms, this parasitical relationship speaks to the
unique sensitivity of photographic registration by visually reinforcing the conti-
guity of the referent, the means of transmission, and the resulting image. Hence,
we find an odd nesting of associations: if the spirits parasitically borrow from
the body to produce material evidence of their existence, then the photographs
that document this phenomenon seem to borrow from the corporeal spectacle
they depict in much the same way. This corporeality seems to reiterate the very
physical nature of photographic representation and thus graphically substantiates
the image.
The third way in which ectoplasm images articulate the referentiality of
photography via the body builds upon the first two. Specifically, the notion
of uncontrollable impulses extends the body-as-photography analogy to eluci-
date an even more compelling claim for the indexical realism of photography.
Ectoplasmic production seems to overcome the medium, as if internal systems,
such as respiration, reproduction, and digestion, are forcing excretions out of
Downloaded by [University of Kent] at 09:47 24 November 2014

the body's orifices. Therefore, the materialization process-and by association

photographic representation-is likened to biological functions that lack inten-
tion and often operate in spite of conscious thought. These automatic processes
of human physiology stand in for photography, suggesting that the camera can
produce an image without human intervention. Here the body confirms the
veracity of the image by promoting the idea of photography as representation
freed from conscious motivation.
As one of the final chapters in spirit photography's adaptive iconographic
history, ectoplasms were burdened with both substantiating the existence of
spirits and bolstering the evidential character of the photographic process. While
probably few viewers first discovered the indexical character of the photographic
medium from viewing ectoplasms, the images manifest indexicality in a forceful
drama of image production and thus point to the ascendance of indexicality over
other discourses of visual realism at the start of the twentieth century. If, as this
essay maintains, ectoplasms depended upon a corporeal spectacle to dramatize
indexical registration, then this bizarre and sensational enactment also forces us
to consider photographic representation as something other than transparent
reflection. Unlike nineteenth-century spirit photographs, which leave the means
of visually rendering apparitions a mystery, ectoplasm photographs place the
process in full view and, as a result, highlight rather than obscure the idea of
photography as mediation. These twentieth-century images indicate that photog-
raphy, in its very haptic nature, is never a completely pure means of transmis-
sion. Rather, they depict photographic representation as a traumatic proceeding
that disrupts and threatens to destroy the event it aims to preserve. It is interest-
ing, then, that in their effort to supply evidence for the permanence of the
human spirit after death, ectoplasm photographs confront us with the certainty,
the physical fact, that the moment pictured will never be lived again.

Karl Schoonover is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown
University. His dissertation analyzes the importance of violence to theories of film realism.

40 FALL 2003
Downloaded by [University of Kent] at 09:47 24 November 2014

Two photographs from 1913 capture

an ectoplasm as it is expelled through
the medium's mouth, seeming to fix
the movement of plasma In mld·air,
much like A. M.Worthington's well-
known instantaneous photographs of
milk splashes published In 1908.

4I art journal