Photography has been a medium closely tied to death since its invention. Some of its earliest subjects were the dead, for the simple reason that they were the only ones who could stay still long enough for the exposure times required of early photographic technology. Taking a more philosophical bent, many have discussed photography in terms of its intrinsic capacity for reminding humans of the transience of life through its ability to suspend the human image at a particular point in time; "recording media bear witness to the continued existence of the dead where the human eye and ear cannot" (Thurschwell, 2003). Given that, it was not all that far a philosophical leap during the medium's early years that it would be a technology capable of capturing images of the invisible spirits of the dead. This practice, known as spirit photography, was widespread in the United States and Europe during the period of Spiritualism's peak popularity, from the 1850s through the early twentieth century (Chéroux, 2005). It took a variety of forms, but most were manifestations of the belief that "the photograph could not lie" (Gunning, 2003).

Spiritualism may have been born in the 1850s, but it was the American Civil War that truly put wind in its sails. Millions of families were left in mourning by the war's extraordinary death toll, and the Spiritualists, who seemed to be able to provide concrete and documentable proof of the existence of life after death, were very appealing to people longing for one last chance to communicate with a loved one. William Mumler is widely considered the first practitioner of spirit photography. He made his first "spirit photograph" in 1862, after finding the faint image of a woman on top of another portrait, presumably as a result of an incomplete cleaning of the plate. He decided to show it to a Spiritualist friend as a joke, insisting that he had no idea where the image of the woman had come from. Mumler's friend convinced him to write an account of this on the back of the photo and had it published, attracting widespread attention. Mumler soon began charging for his talents, which he advertised as mediumistic; he would channel spirits so that they could appear on the photographs. He charged high rates and attracted very prestigious clientele. One of his most famous portraits is that of Mary Todd Lincoln with the figure of Abraham Lincoln's spirit standing protectively behind her with his hands on her shoulders. Various skeptics attempted to prove that Mumler was doctoring his photos, with mixed results. Some failed to find fault with his process, but there were also significant instances of people recognizing one of the "spirits" in his photographs to be people they knew who were still alive. Mumler was brought before a judge and accused of falsifying his photos, and although the case was never brought before a jury and he was acquitted for lack of evidence, the highly publicized case destroyed his reputation (Cloutier, 2004).

The enormous number of images he created, however, had a powerful influence on the medium, both in terms of style and popularity. His style of spirit photograph typically consisted of the portrait's subject along with another pale and translucent figure behind or near them, often interacting with them in some way, but this was far from the only form spirit photographs came in. In others, the spirits were simply floating heads or faces, ranging from distinct and recognizable to nothing more than the suggestion of features. Beyond the realm of studio photography was the practice of photographing mediums and séances. Some séances, such as the famous ones involving the summoning of the spirit of Katie King by the medium Florence Cook, involved photographs of a fully manifested and seemingly corporeal ghost (who in that case happened to look strikingly similar to the medium who summoned her) (Fischer, 2004). Others revolved mostly around attempting to capture the emission of ectoplasm, often from a medium's mouth or nose. Ectoplasm was believed to be a substance necessary for spirits to be able to interact with the physical world, and tended to appear as a viscous or textile blob in photographs. Since séances were usually conducted in total darkness, using photography in conjunction with flares was believed to be the only way to capture the fleeting presence of ectoplasm. 

A third form of spirit photography was that of the capture of energies or auras, emerging from the discovery that images could be created by physically interacting with photographic plates. The discovery of the X-ray fueled speculation that humans emitted more kinds of energy than could be perceived by the human eye. In a contemporary defense of the legitimacy of spirit photography published in 1911, John Coates insists

He goes on to conclude that this magnetic radiation likely plays some role in the creation of spirit photography. It was certainly common for mediums to attempt to demonstrate their abilities by interacting directly with a plate, although the images generated by this process tended to be less conclusive and much more dependent on the willingness of the viewer to see meaning in shapes that others might find arbitrary. But it's also important to note that spirit photography was constantly subject to testing and inquisition by both opponents and proponents, all attempting to prove its validity or falsehood and the ways--either scientific, theatrical, or chemical--that it was created.

Proponents of the practice (who still exist, although their numbers are significantly diminished compared to the eleven million American Spiritualists claimed by Mumler's defense during his hearing (Jolly, 2006)) frequently cite the photographers, judges, and other respected figures who attempted to scrutinize the processes of spirit photographers and failed to find any evidence of tampering or foul play--many of whom were eventually turned from skeptics into believers. But most scholarship meant to prove its authenticity deliberately ignores evidence to the contrary--including accounts by spirit photographers themselves. This is primarily because Spiritualists believed in these phenomena because they satisfied an emotional need. The emotionally vulnerable were much more likely to want to believe in an afterlife of continued communication with the living, a reassuring concept. The fact that contemporary science seemed miraculous enough to support these kinds of phenomena was only a reinforcement that allowed otherwise rational people to accept something that improbable. It fell from popularity when that scientific ambiguity began to be replaced by a degree of general understanding and comfort with where the boundaries of the scientifically possible lay. And also, tragically, when the Western world became more accustomed to the scale of the devastation of modern warfare.

Technically, there were several ways in which spirit photographs could be created. There are even more when its various forms (such as séance documentation or photographs of auras and energies) are taken into account. This paper will only look at the ways in which photographic "extras," or faces and figures that appear in photographs in addition to the photo's living subject or subjects, are created. As photographers testified during Mumler's trial, there were nine ways that his photographs could be produced. At the time, photographs were made by coating a glass plate with the photographic emulsion and then placing them within a light-tight plate holder before bringing them out of the darkroom to take the photograph. A dark slide was pulled back from the front of the plate, the exposure was taken, and the dark slide was replaced. Then the plate was developed and printed.

Later spirit photographs, up to the present day, seem to be more often ambiguous and less a product of a careful process, and more a product of quirks of the nature of cameras and photography. When a photo is being taken with a long exposure, moving lights or objects can appear to have ghostly auras or trails. Specks of dust that catch the light of a flash can appear to be ghostly orbs. Processing errors, faulty film, or light leaks can create shapes that can be easily interpreted as spirits by those who want to see them as such.

Many early practitioners of spirit photography either entered the field at the urging of friends or family members who considered themselves mediums. This was the case with Mumler, whose wife was a medium and who had Spiritualist friends before he himself joined the movement (Cloutier, 2004), and Frederick Hudson, who created spirit photographs in collaboration with Georgiana Houghton, a wealthy British woman who believed herself to have mediumistic powers (Jolly, 2006). Many others seemed to do it largely for the money, publicity, and prestige. The French spirit photographer Eduoard Buguet claimed his mesmeric powers allowed him to create images of the dead, but when brought to trial for fraud, readily admitted that the photos were created using mannequins and his assistants, made up to look vaguely like the deceased family members of those sitting for his portraits (Jolly, 2006). This early form of spirit photography did not have many practitioners who genuinely believed that something supernormal was occurring when they created these photographs because the process required to make them consistently was so labor- and planning-intensive. The only possibility for believing one had made an authentic spirit photograph is if the photographer made a technical error while preparing the plate that caused another image to appear on the negative, which certainly happened, but was not readily duplicable (for obvious reasons).

The question of how and why other people, who would seem to be otherwise fully rational and intelligent, believed in the authenticity of spirit photography is another issue entirely. Trials such as Mumler's and Buguet's certainly brought a great deal of public attention to the fact that many reputable specialists had roundly denounced the practice as fraudulent and manipulative. But even when witnesses at Buguet's trial were brought in to testify to the authenticity of his photos, and when Buguet himself told them that the photos he sold them were fake, they refused to believe him (Jolly, 2006). Even though the faces they perceived as belonging to their dead family and friends were the same faces used in many other photographs, the fact that they "recognized" them made it almost impossible to believe otherwise. Recognition "allowed them to short-circuit in their own minds the thought that the images might have been manufactured beforehand" (Jolly, 2006).

In more extreme cases, the will to believe is seemingly powerful enough to sustain a Spiritualist. An interesting example of this is Cyril Permutt's Beyond the Spectrum, a book published in 1983--well after belief in spirit photography had practically disappeared--that is meant to assert the medium's authenticity. Permutt cites many of the exact same examples of spirit photography as more objective sources, but fails to recognize or acknowledge facts that contradict his opinion. He describes, for example, Mumler's first "spirit photograph" in the same terms as contemporary Spiritualist sources did (Permutt, 1983), failing to acknowledge the fact that in Mumler's own autobiography, he noted that his statement about the source of the photograph was a result of wanting to have "a little fun...at [his friend's] expense" (Cloutier, 2004). Throughout the rest of the book, Permutt's governing argument seems to be that faking spirit photographs would be so time- and labor-intensive that hardly anyone would go through the trouble of doing it only to fool someone. He fails to take into account the money, attention, prestige, and power that the ability to create such images provided.

Less energy has gone into analyzing the methods that modern ghost-hunters use to capture the images of spirits, if only because modern spiritualism doesn't have the massive popular support or stylistic uniformity that it had a century ago. What's apparent from websites selling instruments for capturing images of ghosts is that the practice has also taken the angle of being much more oriented towards field research. Such sites value cameras for being responsive: "When you're in a hot spot during an investigation and your camera hangs up with each photograph it takes, you could miss that perfect shot because your camera is not ready!" (Ghost Hunting 101: Camera Equipment - Photography as an Integral Part of Paranormal Investigation, 2011) Modern spirit photography is mostly about capturing evidence of ghosts in the context of hauntings. It doesn't require the photographer to be a medium, merely someone pointing a camera at the right place and the right time. These sites also recommend that would-be spirit photographers get image editing software so that they will be able to zoom in and adjust the photo in order to reveal images not immediately apparent. In this way, like traditional spirit photography, photo processing tools are used deliberately to affect the final image, but ostensibly now spirit photographers are trying to reveal an image rather than insert one. The aim has also changed slightly. Rather than seeking to comfort grieving widows or parents, it's primarily about capturing evidence of the existence of the supernatural. While that element has always been present (especially in photography of séances), it now exists in a very different context.

Given that the practice of attempting to photographically capture ghosts is clearly still in existence, where does spirit photography fall on the "deadness" scale? It's fairly safe to say that spirit photography, as it existed in its heyday, is dead in terms of its original function. It would be very rare that a modern observer, looking at one of Mumler's photos, would believe it to be an image captured of a ghost. Likely due both to the heavy appropriation of ghostly images by entertainment media like film and television, as well as the shift in the way "authentic" ghosts have most commonly been represented, a translucent but otherwise normal-looking figure is no longer uncanny to a modern audience. The advent of widespread public access to photo editing software also has made the general public less apt to believe in that truism about photography being incapable of lying. People are confronted every day with obvious photographic lies, whether in the form of digital graphics, tabloids, or the covers of magazines. And therein lies the real essence of this question--that the meaning and efficacy of a medium is dependent on how a populace perceives the technology itself.

As stated previously, when Spiritualism was at its height, the average person was being barraged with new, miraculous technologies that seemingly made the impossible possible. Photography was seen in a more limited way--it was just a tool for capturing the image of what was placed in front of a camera. As photographers experimented, made mistakes, and explored the medium creatively, different affordances emerged, but it took a while for an understanding of those capabilities to trickle down to society as a whole. And once spirit photography was established as a medium that could provide emotional gratification, its adherents were much more resistant to absorbing those truths. It was comforting for them to be able to believe that the spirits of loved ones were near and could be communicated with. This was more important than the mechanics of the medium, although some believers such as Coates went to great lengths to insist that it was, in fact, scientifically possible. 

Today there are likely still many who believe that capturing the images of spirits photographically is possible, but it's a much less personal practice. A human-like figure or a blurry suggestion of a face is now as much as modern Spiritualists expect. Probably only a very, very few hobbyists believe they can summon dead relatives and create recognizable images of them. In that sense, traditional spirit photography is dead. In this context, belief becomes one of the tools necessary for interpreting the medium as it was originally intended, just as literacy is necessary for interpreting a book. Modern scholars can look back at old spirit photographs and understand them in an intellectual sense, but the true experience of the medium is impossible without the belief that a spirit was actually present when the photo was taken.

A natural next step from there is to wonder whether or not there are any modern media or technologies that might require a similar measure of credulity. With the Internet and the way that information can spread virally now, it's much harder for truths to remain concealed than in the 19th century. Anyone looking to understand a technological phenomenon and has Internet access would have a much easier time of doing so. But even though society in general has the access to this information doesn't mean that people consume it or believe it. Much like in the age of Spiritualism, individuals generally believe what makes them feel most secure. The other side effect of modern technology is that there has been a leap forward in what we thought was possible, similar to the leap that occurred at the advent of photography, the telegraph, and rapid mass transit. There is certainly a similar kind of faith in what nanobots might be able to do, bolstered by speculative science reporting and depictions of them in film and television. The idea that a human consciousness could be digitized is also something not fully understood, but believed by some. 

Without the benefit of hindsight, there's no real way to know whether these kinds of speculations are accurate predictions of the course of future technology or complete over-estimations of what these technologies are actually capable of. But there is certainly a symmetry between seeing the spirit of your dead father next to you in a photograph and being able to chat with his spirit in a digitized form. Even if it's not authentic, is it enough that a medium would be able to emulate that experience? Like a mourning woman looking at an indistinct face and recognizing her dead child, would the human imagination be able to bridge the gap between imprecise representation and reality? It is entirely possible. Gullibility is as firmly founded in emotional need as it is in a lack of knowledge. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, now perceived as a paragon of reason, was a firm believer in the authenticity of spirit photography. Without a thorough understanding of the mechanics and cultural context of a medium, there is very little way to gauge the truth of what it is communicating, and that's as true today as it was in 1860. Spirit photography is a reminder and a warning to remain critical, lest you risk future generations judging you a credulous rube.

Chéroux, C. (2005). The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Cloutier, C. (2004). Mumler's Ghosts. In C. Cheroux, & A. Fischer, The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (pp. 20-28). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Coates, J. (1911). Photographing the Invisible: Practical Studies in Spirit Photography, Spirit Portraiture, and Other Rare but Allied Phenomena. Chicago, IL: The Advanced Thought Publishing Co.

Doyle, A. C. (2010). Spirit Photography. Kessinger Publishing.

Ferris, A. (2003). The Disembodied Spirit. Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Fischer, A. (2004). The Reciprocal Adaptation of Optics and Phenomena: The Photographic Recording of Materializations. In C. Cheroux, & A. Fischer, The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (pp. 171-189). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Ghost Hunting 101: Camera Equipment - Photography as an Integral Part of Paranormal Investigation. (2011). (World Nexus Publications) Retrieved 2012, from In the Shadows: Paranormal Project: http://www.thedimensionzone.com/paranormal/the_technology_camera_equipment.htm

Gunning, T. (2003). Haunting Images: Ghosts, Photography, and the Modern Body. In A. Ferris, The Disembodied Spirit. Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

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

Jolly, M. (2006). Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography. London, England: The British Library.

Permutt, C. (1983). Beyond the Spectrum: A Survey of Supernormal Photography. Cambridge, England: Patrick Stephens.

Thurschwell, P. (2003). Refusing to Give Up the Ghost: Some Thoughts on the Afterlife from Spirit Photography to Phantom Films. In A. Ferris, The Disembodied Spirit. Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

I'd like to focus primarily on Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, because throughout my reading of it, I was continually struck by the clear similarities between the period following the introduction of the printing press and the much more recent period following the advent of the World Wide Web.

I would argue that the innovations of mass-printing and the web have had very similar effects on how content is created, disseminated, viewed, and understood as well as a similar impact on the human population and world as a whole. Ultimately, I believe that the two technological advances are the most significant leaps in the ways in which information is generated and disseminated in human history.

On a more graphical level, printing meant that "styles of lettering became more sharply polarized into two distinct groups of type--'Gothic' and 'Roman.'" While certainly the web is known for having a limited number of standard typefaces, I don't think as direct a comparison can be made about this subject. If anything, today the average person in the Western world is aware of more typefaces than they've ever been. 

Eisenstein goes on to discuss how the standardization of styles made people more aware of the differences between them. One of her examples is that the dissemination of dress patterns made Europeans aware of what a Spanish-style dress looked like relative to theirs. And I think exposure to the web has engendered a greater understanding of graphical styles among non-designers. Average people are aware of whether or not a website is modern, what audience it's aimed at, etc. Certainly this is partially an extension of a graphical understanding that's been developing for centuries, but it's become sharper in the past two decades.

Eisenstein also briefly discusses Montaigne and the fact that his style of writing was part of a new wave of depicting the imperfect self rather than idealized archetypes in literature. He "brought his private self out of hiding...[and] displayed it for public inspection." Nothing can be a better analog to the modern surge of blogging and microblogging. It's more popular than ever for people to display their private selves for public inspection.

Early printers also played similar roles to early webmasters. They often had to not only print books but to create content for them and lay them out. They were organizers, writers, graphic artists, technicians, and businessmen all at once. This is less prevalent now that the web has become more organized and systematized, but early webmasters were similarly jacks of all trades. They created the code for their site as well as the content and navigation. They were expected to be able to do everything necessary to create that product.

Eisenstein spends a lot of time discussing organization within early books and its relationship to how medieval scholars organized their libraries and the contents of volumes themselves. It was clear to early printers that a main selling point for their books was how well organized and composed they were. Customers were looking for books that were useful and comprehensible. In a way, early printers were some of the first practitioners of user experience design and information architecture. They were economically compelled to provide products that users would find useful.

Another point that struck me was the discussion about various methods by which the distribution of classical texts allowed for their collective improvement. Scholars from across the region could work on organizing and indexing the same volume in different ways. When those approaches, improvements and analyses were combined, they resulted in a greatly improved final product. Interestingly enough, this reminded me of how fan communities work collaboratively to parse information from a show (say, LOST) to create insight and analysis that could not be easily generated by an individual.

It's also described how the pace of corruption increased enormously in the period following the advent of printing. This can certainly be applied to the web as well, where facts can become enormously twisted within very short periods of time. The lack of accountability means that there is no way to know, looking at a website in a vacuum, whether the information on it is accurate or not.

But like in the early modern era, when some publishers encouraged their readers to send in corrections, "creat[ing] vast networks of correspondents," many of the web's most trusted sources of information, such as Wikipedia, allow for huge communities of content creators and editors to dispute the information that's collected there. Early printers created what we might see as their own rudimentary benevolent social fact-checking networks.

Despite all these parallels, there are also a few ways in which the two media differ. One major problem with the printed book as opposed to earlier volumes was that it employed paper, which was highly perishable compared to the animal-skin-based parchment employed by scribes. It meant that books, while they could be widely distributed, would not weather the centuries well. On the web, information is certainly easy to lose--think of all the content that disappeared when Geocities shut down--but on the other hand, it also has the potential to be immortal and unchanging.  As storage becomes cheaper and cheaper, and cloud-computing continues to gain ground, all data is being stored in more places at once, and its location is more fluid. It's much harder for anything to be permanently lost.

Ultimately, the printed book and the web have both ushered in new eras of scholarship, information dissemination, and human thought in many more ways than I've had space to list here. Both have brought about fundamental changes in how people interact with information. We've yet to fully understand the impact of the printed book, so I can't image how much longer it will be before we fully grasp the impact of the yet-young innovation of the web.

Nobody ever seems to believe me when I say this, but I think all of it is genuinely hilarious and worth your time. If you're not 100% satisfied, I will reimburse however many minutes of internet you spent on it. That's right, you will be able to come over to my house and use my internet! I don't think you can beat that deal.

Anyways, GO CHECK IT OUT.

These are really just different angles from which to describe the same phenomenon rather than separate elements, but I'm sure you get the picture. Comedy is to think one thing and then be surprised when it turns out to be something else. It's like ten thousand spoons, when all you need is a knife. (Or is that something else?)

On the other hand, what is the modern web, at its heart?

In other words, the web as we understand it is a system that in its ideal form would usher a user immediately to the information they seek. It would be perfectly clear and logical. Every choice would be transparent.

I was thinking a lot about this at World Information Architecture Day this past weekend. I ate lunch with a friend from my IA class who's also a comedy nerd and we talked about the difficulties of written humor and the value of being able to edit, among other things, so it started me down a bit of a deceptively long intellectual path. The field of Information Architecture is all about not surprising a user. It's also about making the system as invisible as possible.

This migration to comfortable sandboxes is partially about efficiency and a sense of comfort, but it's also based on fear of the dangers of the web that a ten-year period of always having some kind of horrible malware on your computer put in us.

So what are the results of this? Well, for one, people in general have a much better mental model for how a website SHOULD work. A link should lead to relevant content. A site should have apparent navigation. A search should return results relevant to your query. There should be a degree of visual logic and cleanness. A site should passively await your input. All of these things fit into the definitions of what the modern web should do that I outlined earlier.

But it's interesting to note that each of these things is diametrically opposed to how humor works. They're literally the other side of the coin. Which is why Geocities sites from 1998 are funny to us now. We have an internalized paradigm of a functional web, and those old sites blatantly disregard all of its precepts.

This has been a lot of talking in a circle around my point, so I'll try to make it. Hypertext is inherently an ideal means by which to create comedy because it's about connecting two things. Web users have developed an understanding of it as only being applicable to related, logical connections, but there's nothing inherent in the technology that mandates it be functional or logical or seamless. Amateur web designers illustrate that for us.

The logical question that you might be asking is what would this form of humor look like and how would it work? I think there have been a couple examples of it, the first of which is this excellent work of art by the granddaddy of Information Architecture, Richard Saul Wurman, and the second of which is this infuriating and sort of awe-inspiring personal webpage that my buddy Max sent me a while ago. And also because I just can't fucking resist making a goddamn Tim and Eric reference, this wonderful B$M-inspired page.

Rick Rolling might be a sort of ham-fisted, pranky example, but is built on the correct fundamental structure. You're compelled to click a link for something you expect to be interesting and novel and are surprised (perhaps resentfully) to be redirected to the now-universal archetype of a hypertextual punchline. The second example takes the (now somewhat passe) idea of a splash page and extends it to the point of absurdism. It also uses a very web-specific aesthetic. And I believe Chef Goldblum speaks for himself.

Anyway, all of these examples are can only be experienced as websites. They're fundamentally funny because of our expectations of what a website is and they express their humor largely through linking. I've been poking around at this idea for a while, and one result is my baby, Gooble Search (and its child page, Uncle Jeffy's Net Site). Both are still in formative stages, but I think they're interesting avenues to explore, or at least ones that Brine has been peering down with its watery little myopic eyes recently.

A whole other article could be dedicated to the written and presentational style specific to the web, which I think is far more expressive than conventional writing because it rejects grammatical, typographical, and punctuational rules to more clearly convey intended delivery, but I won't go into it much more than that. I'll just say that the enormous popularity of the horse_ebooks Twitter account speaks for itself.

I guess what I'd like to leave you with, single reader who is still reading right now, is that--oh, you left, didn't you?** God damn it.

* For several years, my dad got away with hosting a web and email server out of our basement before Comcast realized it and told him to shut it down. It basically consisted of a header and a scrolling marquee that said "Serving the tri-state area for thirty years." The good old days.