Ghostly Spirits - continued...

Spirit photography: photochemical traces from another world

1872, Spiritualist 15, April 25/1:
"Within the last six weeks in London,
spirit photography has set in like a flood."

When Sir Francis Galton started to take composite photographs in the 1870s and compared their blurriness to ghostliness, composite photographs and transformers had a lot in common with the spirit photography of the same period. In 1861 in Boston, William Mumler, without knowing much about the photomechanical process, had taken some photographs of himself in a friend's laboratory and then developed them in the dark room. The results were astonishing! In each of his portraits another person appeared behind him, a negative one, white and ephemeral, but sharp. A spirit? Or just a badly aligned attempt to produce a Galtonian transformer?

reproduced from: Rolf H. Krauss, Jenseits von Licht und Schatten, p. 102