The Ghost and the Gimmick: Spirit Photography and the Commodification of Secularism

Abstract This article considers how spirit photography operates in the context of secularism. It begins by tracking controversies around two nineteenth-century spirit photographers, William J. Mumler and Edouard Buguet, examining photographs and written texts made with the purpose of mocking and debunking Spiritualism. Intended to amuse, these works pointed the finger at the real frauds and their dupes; they sold their audiences both the pleasures of illusions and the satisfaction of holding themselves apart from the backward-thinking people who believed in them. The article identifies this process as the commodification of secularism: a celebration of skepticism and knowingness that demonstrated the market value of demystification. Over time, the style of demystification-as-entertainment foregrounded by trick spirit photographs accrued aesthetic significance, leading to their twenty-first-century reinvention as objects of art. Latter-day viewers were thoroughly familiar with the ways pictures could be faked. Yet if that awareness distinguished contemporary viewers as technologically sophisticated, this sophistication was unaccompanied by the fantasies of progress that secular knowledge has historically fueled. The disenchantment with disenchantment ironically led to an embrace of the spirit photograph as remnant of a bygone era of belief—one that significantly increased their market value.