Every Picture is a Ghost: Photography and the Invisible

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature.”—Brian Eno

Since the inception of photography in 1839, people have tried to photograph things they couldn’t see—ghosts, dreams, prayers, sickness, sin, psychic powers, and even the human soul. The resulting images are sometimes beautiful, often disturbing, and highly questionable. So, too, are the methodologies that produced them.

One photographic experimenter strapped a light-sensitive plate to an angry person’s forehead to make a picture of a feeling, while another left emulsions beneath the night sky to capture “celestographs” of distant stars. Some researchers made photographic impressions of a mummified hand after it was mesmerized by three hypnotists for four weeks. Other researchers compared images of electric sparks made on a prostitute’s freshly washed skin with those made on the flesh of a little girl.

Though prominent intellectuals joined in this weird research, it is considered absurd and is generally omitted from the canon. The time to reexamine photography’s bizarre shadow history is now. Pictures that confront the invisible show how photography has persistently challenged the boundaries of what is real—and it is this same boundary, in the age of generative artificial intelligence, that image-making faces today.

Visualizing the invisible often depends on what most professional photographers call “mistakes.” Motion blur, lens distortion, light leaks, flare, and double exposure can produce effects that lend themselves to both physical and metaphysical explanations. Such images amplify everything strange that photography can do. Errors or artifacts of the photographic process open new ways of seeing and expose the medium’s unstable relationship with truth. How do accidents, chance, and belief shape an image’s meaning? How do they affect photography’s power to transform, mimic, or conjure?

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) was among the first photographers to embrace imperfection as an otherworldly expression. For her, image-making was akin to prayer—a devotional act through which she sought the divine. Though technically skilled, she chose softness and damage over clarity, accepting cracks and marks, and famously questioning the camera’s most basic function: “What is focus, and who has the right to say what focus is the legitimate focus?” In Cameron’s vision, flaws were part of the staging. Critics mocked her images, deeming them “altogether repulsive” in The Photographic News. Yet she held to the belief that photography could transcend reality, and repeatedly used the same models, props, and drapery to make her point. Her work anticipated later movements that would seek emotion over perfection, such as Pictorialism, Surrealism, and the raw intimacy of Nan Goldin’s snapshots.

Cameron never doubted that photographs could be art—a radical belief for her time. For her, the image was not a copy of reality but a thing in and of itself. It took until the 1980s, when photography was finally emerging from the shadow of fine art, for Cameron’s tableaux to be positively reassessed by the art world. Today, the argument that photography is inferior to sculpture, drawing, or painting because it is a mechanical, chemical, or digital process has mostly lost its teeth. It stands, triumphant, as a legitimized art form. Shortly after finding this solid ground, however, photography’s status is shifting. The rise of AI-generated imagery invites us to ask again: What is photography? The medium’s raw features are prime for reassessment.

Photographs are strange—and it is easy to forget this, given their omnipresence in modern life. They bring the past into the present, like a haunting. Photography is a death-defying feat, a form of time travel. Among its uncanny features, practitioners note a form of telepathy called “the photographer’s eye,” which allows masters of the medium to communicate their thoughts without words.

The camera obscura, foundational to the invention of photography, reflects the world upside down and backwards inside a black box. It was once considered a sorcerer’s tool. Throughout history, mirrors and dark chambers have symbolized gateways to other realms. It was long believed that a person’s reflection holds their soul, giving rise to fears about being photographed. Scrying mirrors and the caves and grottos used for rituals symbolized divination, creation, dream incubation, and the land of the dead. The dark chambers of cameras or darkrooms link to these old ideas about magic.

The very basis of photography has paranormal resonance. Once this is acknowledged, paranormal pictures become a meta commentary on the medium. Photographs that confront the invisible aren’t just fringe; they provide insight into the nature of photography itself. They emphasize how photography crosses boundaries between subjective and objective worlds.

“In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it.”
—John Archibald Wheeler

In the 1860s, William Mumler (1832–1884), known as the first “spirit photographer,” produced pictures that appeared to show the living and the dead posed together in parlor settings. This technique emerged by accident when Mumler, an amateur photographer who reused glass plate negatives, unwittingly created a self-portrait that appeared to include the ghost of his deceased cousin. Mumler was not the first to use the translucent effect that can be achieved through double exposure, but his spirit images were the first to catch on.

After being embraced by a culture enthralled by communication with the dead, he launched a lucrative business producing post-death portraits. This controversial practice called photographic reality into question. To the skeptic, the images looked like manipulated exposures; to the believer, they were spiritual revelations. Mumler was set up in a sting charged with fraud, and brought to trial over his photographs. Ultimately acquitted due to lack of evidence, he was publicly shamed and died penniless.

Mumler’s spirit photographs are usually dismissed as carnival tricks that duped the gullible, yet such literalism flattens the mystery behind their popularity and obscures their meaning. Mumler’s phantasmagorias of matter and spirit communing on a single plane can also be read as the new in correspondence with the old.

Is spirit photography a modern manifestation of an ancient ritual gesture? Like a cave painter, the spirit photographer uses a darkened enclosure to transform imagination into image. Like a shaman with a mask, Mumler was a conduit, inviting a psychological encounter with the ancestors in the spirit world.

Across cultures, such devices were not seen as parodies or empty vessels but rather as temporary housing for other dimensions. Surfaces were employed to hold energies and embody mysteries of life that could be sensed without being seen. Mumler gave shape to a reality that was being perceived by his own culture—that, somehow, the living and the dead remain connected. Mumler’s customers, who testified under oath to the authenticity of his works, may have accepted that a true thing is not always a fact.

As with Mumler, one of the forces behind the urge to picture the invisible was a new religion. Spiritualism was born in a haunted house in America on the eve of April Fools’ Day in 1848, when sisters Kate and Margaret Fox claimed to contact the spirit of a murdered man said to be buried beneath their floorboards.

What began as a ghost story told by young girls quickly evolved into a movement that spread across the Western world. The Fox sisters’ method of letter-coded rapping was soon dubbed “the spiritual telegraph,” a term linking mediumship to the era’s new messaging technologies. The telegraph carried words through wires, the phonograph bound sound to matter, and the telephone sent live voices across space.

Perceptions of reality were shifting radically. Photography was part of the tech that expanded the senses, giving science the power to show what was once invisible, such as germs, electricity, or bones beneath skin. What else, people wondered, might be uncovered or set free?

A fusion of religion, science, and art, Spiritualism sought evidence of spirits through representation. Entranced Spiritualist painters such as Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884) and Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) helped to incite modern art, but the movement’s iconography was ghosts caught on film.

Photography became its perfect medium. Spiritualism came to depend on the medium to communicate its theology, just as the Catholic Church had used painting and sculpture. Spirit photographs can be read as parables of mourning, aching records of love and loss linked to the eternal question: What comes after death?

At the center of this strange visual archive is ectoplasm, Spiritualism’s sacred symbol. Ectoplasm illustrated the belief that life and death remain connected. Weirdly photographic, the substance was described as pliant, gelatinous, and light-sensitive, like picture emulsion. It was coaxed from the medium’s body under dim red light, slowly taking form like an image in a darkroom.

In ectoplasm pictures, women, and sometimes men, appear contorted in states of undress, flailing naked, or even sewn into bags to keep them from cheating. Prior to séances, investigators often conducted cavity searches as precautions against fraud, yet phantom forms still oozed from orifices.

The term “mediumistic labor” was used to describe the production of ectoplasm, and the sights, sounds, and smells that accompanied it were compared with those of semen, menstruation, orgasm, and birth. To instigate the process, the medium was placed in a box. The cabinet, the camera, and the séance space merged in a recurring sequence of dark chambers. But the images that emerged were not the scientific evidence that was hoped for; instead, they suggested a dream theater of grotesque art.

Ectoplasm photographs rendered the ethereal matter as frightening, funny, and flat. Phenomena that witnesses had described as animated and shape-shifting appeared like papier-mâché dolls, cut-up faces from magazines, or constructions made of cotton, cord, or cheesecloth.

A primary documentarian of ectoplasm, the German physician, hypnotist, and sexologist Albert von Schrenck-Notzing (1862–1929), concluded: “A photograph reproduces only an instant, abstracted from the flow of the living . . .  For this reason, the effect it produced could only be crude and deceptive.” Like other photographic representations introduced during the 19th century—microphotography, astrophotography, high-speed motion studies, electrographs, and X-rays—pictures of séances confused the relationship between seeing and knowing.

Ectoplasm may have been deemed absurd, but it also facilitated scientific exchange at the highest levels. Nobel laureates and renowned physicists, mathematicians, chemists, astronomers, and inventors studied ectoplasmic séances together. The superstars of these crude dramas were female trauma survivors: women of low social status who boggled the greatest minds of their time.

As the story goes, great magicians such as Houdini explained it all away. The primary sources are, at points, hilarious, sad, and terrifying. An honest read reveals that, alongside the blatant fraud, certain moments remain genuinely unexplained. Some researchers have argued that the fake played a part in bringing forth the real.

The artist Tony Oursler has cited the wild creativity at work in ectoplasmic displays, comparing its most masterful mediums to avant-garde artists. The ritualized performance of inexplicable acts—complete with bodily transformation, spirit invocation, and sensory theatrics—also resembles shamanic practice. In these images of entranced bodies materializing the dead in the dark, the borders between science, art, and religion break down.

Beyond séances, photography also turned its lens on contorted female bodies in another realm of sensitive inquiry: medical hysteria. Once thought to result from a “wandering womb,” hysteria was theorized as an illness of excessive emotion.

At the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, an asylum for women, Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) studied patients diagnosed with the disorder. Among the first to attempt to visually document illness, Charcot helped establish neurology as a scientific discipline, laid the groundwork for psychoanalysis, inspired early medical imaging, and even influenced the birth of cinematography. It was one of many historical moments in which the seemingly irrational became a catalyst for abiding innovation.

Charcot’s photographs of women in seizure, locked in rigid poses, or caught in ecstatic trance were meant to depict illness. They also suggested the conditions of starlets, saints, or séance mediums. With a clinical approach like that of a film director, Charcot cast specific patients, staged their performances, and orchestrated their responses using hypnosis, electrical stimulation, or even genital manipulation. He invited audiences to witness these events and had assistants capture them on camera.

The resulting publication, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (1876–80), exists at the intersection of evidence, art, and exploitation. How did performance, expectation, and power shape these symptoms? Scholars have argued that the camera did not merely capture hysteria, but co-authored its creation. Charcot’s bizarre images were groundbreaking, not just for inspiring new intellectual paradigms, but also for exposing the constructed nature of photographic reality.

“The grotto remains the physical point of connection to the transcendental in the Western imagination.” 

—Victoria Nelson

Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc (1850–1909), a specialist in nervous disorders, first encountered photography while interning at the Salpêtrière Hospital under Charcot. His early experiments began as an inquiry into the medium’s therapeutic potential, but soon evolved into a theory for transcribing the human soul. Perhaps no other practitioner has been so explicit in proposing photography’s connection to the divine.

Charcot had used the term iconography to suggest that his photographs of hysterical patients represented not individuals, but symptoms of an otherwise invisible illness. Baraduc followed suit, but took the idea further. He called his images iconographs—photographs created not with sunlight, but imprinted with the “living light” of the human soul.

Baraduc theorized that this luminous vibration was normally invisible to the human eye due to the overpowering brightness of the sun. To reveal the soul, he emphasized the power of a darkened room: “Is it ancient magic, which comes from the dark sanctuary where it was once adored, and now, in time, bows before human science to unveil itself in turn?”

Using cameras and camera-less techniques in combinations with and without electricity, Baraduc sought snapshots of the soul in different states, such as during a nightmare, in anger, or at prayer. His pictures arose from the emulsions as nonfigurative patterns, suggesting subtle phenomena at the cusp of matter and spirit.

Critics argued that Baraduc’s effects were caused by moisture, pressure, light leaks, or heat affecting the chemical process of photography, but he claimed to have taken precautions against all of these. Baraduc gave his pictures titles detailing the emotional conditions to which they bore witness.

His pairing of interpretive images with text anticipated later developments in abstraction, Surrealism, and conceptual art. Baraduc’s unscientific imagery implies psychological domains that elude measurement: memory, dreams, delusions, visions.

Baraduc dedicated an entire book to a project that highlights the connection among photography, the divine, and the dark chamber. In La Force Curatrice à Lourdes et la Psychologie du Miracle (1907), the concept of darkness as a realm of creation is placed into a feedback loop.

A venerated cavern serves as the center for Baraduc’s collection of soul radiations, to be made visible later, in the photographic darkroom. In the grotto at Lourdes in France, where, in 1858, a young girl named Bernadette saw the Virgin Mary appear 18 times, Baraduc positioned wrapped photographic plates.

There, he captured the atmospheres of healing baths, a procession of pilgrims at the foot of the statue, and the emanation from someone’s beating heart. In this work, we see the ectoplasmic ritual restaged. The apparition, the ecstatic body, the dark chamber, and the observing scientist are recombined, now imbued with the status of a sanctioned miracle.

“I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.”
—Diane Arbus

Beyond its ability to capture what is hidden or fleeting to the naked eye, photography can invent, distort, and reanimate reality. First celebrated as a scientific tool, it was gradually accepted as art. But what about ritual? The medium’s most radical power lies in its ability to move the invisible, the irrational, or the unknown into visible form. Photography is both a mechanical process and a method of conjuring. It answers our ancient impulse to summon the unseen and declare it as real.

Photographing the invisible didn’t stop in the 19th century. Techniques have been repeatedly forgotten and rediscovered, dismissed and revived, continuing into today. After the Victorian spirit photography craze faded, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the hyper-rational Sherlock Holmes, helped revive it between the two world wars. In the 1970s, forms of psychic photography resurfaced in the New Age. Now, digital orb photography has evolved into a Ouija-like communication system.

People use AI technologies to animate images of the dead or upload digital traces of themselves to create avatars that will live on. The filmmaker Adam Curtis has argued that AI itself is nothing but a ghost—scraping fragments of our past and feeding them back to us as the future. What will the constructed reality of AI bring forth? How will it shape our perception of what is real? The relationship that image-making has with the visible and invisible worlds is a mystery that continues to haunt us.▪︎

This is the first in the series Photography and the Invisible that explores the connections between photography, spiritualism, art, and the unseen. Explore more here.

Further Reading

Baraduc H. (1909) La Force curatrice à Lourdes et la psychologie du miracle. Paris.

Baraduc H. (1913) The Human Soul: Its Movements, Its Lights, and the Iconography of the Fluidic Invisible. Librairie Internationale de la Pensee Nouvelle, Paris.

Bourneville D. M., Regnard P. (1876‑80) Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière. Progrès Médical / Adrien Delahaye & Cie, Paris.

Chéroux C., Fischer A., Apraxine P., Canguilhem D. and Schmit S. (2005) The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.

Didi‑HubermanG. (2003) Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA / London.

Dichter C., Golinski H., Krajewski M. and Zander S. (eds) (2007) The Message: Kunst Und Okkultismus/Art and Occultism. Walther Konig, Cologne.

Harvey J. (2007) Photography and Spirit. Reaktion Books, London.

HustvedtA. (2011) Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth‑Century Paris. W. W. Norton & Co., New York. 

Jolly M. (2006) Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography. Mark Batty, West New York, NY.

Kaplan L. (2008) The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.

Krauss R. (1995) Beyond Light and Shadow. Nazraeli Press, Munich.

Keller C. (ed.) (2008) Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible 1840–1900. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.

Mikuriya J. T. (2024) The Darkroom of the Soul. PhotoResearcher No. 41, European Society for the History of Photography.

Nelson V. (2001) The Secret Life of Puppets. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Oursler T. (2016) Imponderable: The Archives of Tony Oursler. JRP|Ringier.

Schrenck-Notzing A. (1920) Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to The Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, London.

Taggart S. (2022) Séance. Atelier Éditions, Los Angeles.

Tucker J. (2005) Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD.

Warner M. (2006) Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century. Oxford University Press, Oxford.