Facts and Photographs: Visualizing the Invisible with Spirit and Thought Photography (original) (raw)

Photography as a Form of Technological Mediumship in the 19th Century Spiritualism

Viraverita, 2022

The nineteenth century has been a process for spiritualists who used their physiological bodies to communicate with spirits. Spiritualists have combined photography with physiology and used technology as "mediums" to prove the visibility of spirits. Nevertheless, the nineteenth century has been also the exploitability of productions as much as their benefits. Spiritualists and spirit photographers have been denounced as impostors. However, spirit photography has endeavored to prove that a reality existed beyond the visible, and the visibility of spirits endorsed the spiritual narratives by invigorating the ties between mediumship and photography. This article will document the arguments of the spiritualists, defenders and debunkers of the nineteenth century and portray their contribution to mediumship.

Spirits, Apparitions, and Traditions of Supernatural Photography

Wojcik, Daniel. "Spirits, Apparitions, and Traditions of Supernatural Photography." Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation 25, no. 1-2 (March-June 2009): 109-136. , 2009

For nearly 150 years, the photographic process has been attributed with the apparitional ability to reveal discarnate beings and miraculous phenomena. In the nineteenth century, members of the Spiritualist movement embraced photography as a technological medium that provided evidence of the afterlife and contact with departed loved ones. Today, traditions of supernatural photography continue to thrive, particularly among the Catholic faithful at Marian apparition sites who regularly use cameras to document miraculous phenomena. This article examines the meaning and appeal of beliefs about photography as a revelatory technology, the popular desire for visible proofs of invisible realms, and the ways that the photographic process allows believers to ritually engage the otherworldly, the sacred, and issues of ultimate concern.

Shamans and Spirits: Photography and the Irrational in the Age of Reason

2007

An examination of the issues around portraits of indigenous Shamans created by frontier photographers at the turn of the 19th Century. The essay looks at the relationship between science, imagination and the occult, making comparisons with Spirit Photography from the same period. It looks at how photography as an object of objectivity helped to shape ideas around non-Western cultures as racially and culturally inferior and the response to this in Europe with Spiritualist photography's attempts to legitimize their occult practices through the 'scientific aura' of photography.

A difficult history of light. About metaphysical ideas of “light writing” formulated before the birth of photography

Images. The International Journal of European Film, Performing Arts and Audiovisual Communication

The reflections presented in this article are devoted to Junko Theresa Mikuriya’s book, A History of Light. The Idea of Photography. It is a unique view on the search for pre-photographic origins of photography in the field of philosophical writings ranging from Plato, through the neoplatonic philosopher Jamblich’s enquiry, to the texts by Philotheus of Batos and by an early Renaissance philosopher, Marsilio Ficino. When thinking about metaphysics present in (moving and still) images, one should not forget about the metaphysics of the image itself. The idea of photography – regardless of whether we are witnessing a fundamental change in an ontological transition from an analogue to a digital form of image recording – obliges us to discuss the “history of light”, as this is what Mikuriya does. While locating the discussed concepts in the context of the history and theory of photography, as well as the archaeology of media, the author of this essay engages in a dialogue with Mikuriya ...

Notes of epistemology of the images

This article has as its subject of analysis the images as they are perceived by the observer. As a heuristic symphony this work is a paradigmatic crossover of the phenomenology, the genetic epistemology and the hermeneutics, amalgamated by semiotics. In the first paragraph, a phenomenological reflection of the images is carried out, reaching a division between internal images and external images and between objective images and sign images. In the second paragraph, a genetic analysis of a thought in images is carried out, reaching a division of the sign images in signal images, index images, icon images, symbol images and sign images with its correspondingly levels of abstraction and societal. Finally, in the third paragraph, hermeneutics of the object images as a cultural unit or culturema is carried out. It ends by framing the present study in visual studies and highlighting their relevance in the context of visual culture.

_Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image_

_Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image_, 2022

Incomprehensible Certainty presents a sustained reflection on the nature of images and the phenomenology of visual experience. Taking the “image” (eikōn) as the essential medium of art and literature and as foundational for the intuitive ways in which we make contact with our “lifeworld,” Thomas Pfau draws in equal measure on Platonic metaphysics and modern phenomenology to advance a series of interlocking claims. First, Pfau shows that, beginning with Plato’s later dialogues, being and appearance came to be understood as ontologically distinct from (but no longer opposed to) one another. Second, in contrast to the idol that is typically gazed at and visually consumed as an object of desire, this study positions the image (eikōn) as a medium whose intrinsic abundance and excess reveal to us its metaphysical function, namely, as the visible analogue of an invisible, numinous reality. Finally, the interpretations unfolded in this book (from Plato, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Damascene via Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Julian of Norwich, and Nicholas of Cusa to modern writers and artists such as Goethe, Ruskin, Turner, Hopkins, C zanne, and Rilke) affirm the essential complementarity of image and word, visual intuition and hermeneutic practice, in theology, philosophy, and literature. Like Pfau’s previous book, Minding the Modern, Incomprehensible Certainty is a major work. With over fifty illustrations, the book will interest students and scholars of philosophy, theology, literature, and art history.

From the specular obstacle to the epistemological illusion in theory of photography

Considering the contributions of photographic history and philosophy of science, this article seeks to raise the relations between science and common sense in the Brazilian construction of a theory of photography, claiming that the convergence between the two modes of knowledge (science and common sense) happens through the imagination.The symbolic images of some heuristic assumptions of Brazilian intellectual production about photography in the period 1999-2009 are analyzed. Underlying to the theoretical construction of the area, the mythology of the mirror is found.