Unknown

        Short post today! I'm taking a history of photography course that focuses on the early part of photo history, and today we looked at some memento mori (memorial photographs) and spirit photography, which got me thinking and sent me on a winding google search when I got home.
        Along the way (on a really cool website, "A Collection of Collections") I stumbled across this series of six images and just thought they were really interesting and visually striking. (The curators of the website imagine the photos are from the 1920s-30s). The people appear to be partaking in "paranormal" activities, and I'm wondering what the intended use of the images was. They are clearly constructed images, as you can see from the image where the faint figure of a man (most likely presented as a "spirit photograph") is just visible to the left. This would have been done in the darkroom, and with (I imagine) the specific intentionality of proving this medium's abilities to communicate with the dead.
        It's interesting now with the tricks of the darkroom and photoshop exposed to consider that there was a time when photographs were considered objective and "true". Anyway, I just thought I would share these/let them marinate. They were just too odd to ignore.

Full set of images



images: brightbytes.com