Ectoplasm is a substance spiritualists believe exists.
It is said to emanate from the body of a medium
and merges the realms of the spiritual and the material.
Spiritualism has tried to distance itself from dark room seances
and things like ectoplasm because it brings about accusations of fraud.
It has a long history of debate.
In our culture, it's seen as very anti-intellectual,
but yet there was all of this intellectual history
that really was very much attached to it.
And that wherever you find 19th Century innovation,
you also find spiritualism.
Lily Dale is the town that is home
to the world's largest spiritualist community.
It's in upstate New York since 1879.
When you walk through the gates, it really does feel like time travel.
I learned about spiritualism as a teenager
after my cousin went to Lily Dale and got a message.
A medium there told her that her grandfather was there.
And when this happened, I was just very shocked by this and I thought,
'Oh, I'll go there and spend a couple of weeks this summer making
a very straightforward documentary project about this quirky little town'.
I really did not expect to be still working on it
20 years later.
Many of the people who live there are
mediums and everyone who lives in the town is a spiritualist.
When I began photographing spiritualism,
I was making pictures of people telling me
that they were having communication happen, but I couldn't see any of it.
So the question that I was confronted with was
'How do you photograph the invisible?'
I started to have some strange happy accidents with my camera.
One of the first ones was when I was photographing a transfiguration
seance and there was this woman holding the red light over her face.
At the time, everybody in the room was seeing a second face.
I did not see the second face.
When I got my negative back, I had a floating face right next to her face.
This photographic accident was uncanny, it was more psychologically true
to the event than any picture I could have made with my own brain.
It felt like I had been accidentally given a language
to talk about the invisible.
As a trained photographer, you are taught to cleanse these anomalies
out of your process and that's what being a technical professional
is to know how to control such things.
I am trying to raise questions about what is
the conjuring power of photography itself,
how you can expose this complicated relationship with truth
that both photography and spiritualism have.
I discovered that spiritualists had their own version
of photography called Spirit photography, and that they were
the most uniquely unsettling images within the history of photography.
These images were not written about
in any of the photo history textbooks that I had studied from.
The first spirit photographer was a man named William Mumler,
who started photographing in Boston.
And one of his most famous spirit photographs
shows Mary Todd Lincoln, the widow of Abraham Lincoln, in a spirit photo.
I think this is one of the ones he wanted to see.
Yeah, the Mumler album, that's in your essay.
He was taken to court
for fraudulent practices which he was never convicted of.
'Is it a real image or is it a doctored image?' And before that,
I think people immediately thought it was an exact representation of reality.
Mumler was famously put on trial for his spirit photographs.
And this is one of the first moments
where photographic reality is called into question.
Spiritualism actually had this intensely intellectual history,
and that it tied to politics, technology, science, art.
Spiritualism began in 1848 in upstate New York,
when two adolescent girls,
Margaret and Kate Fox claimed to be in contact with the spirit
of a murdered man buried beneath their home.
Spiritualism is particularly linked to the women's rights movement because
at a time when it was dangerous for women to speak in public,
spiritualists would host female speakers on their stages and platforms.
Many of the most famous American suffragettes such as Susan B. Anthony
would speak at Lily Dale and other spiritualist camps.
Famous spiritualists include Victoria Woodhull,
who was the first woman to run for president in the United States;
Hilma af Klint and Georgiana Houghton, are currently being acknowledged
as pioneers of abstract expressionism.
Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln hosted
seances in the White House,
although they weren't spiritualists on record.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, many of the biggest scientists
of the day experimented with spiritualism,
Marie Curie, as did William Crookes.
In the mid 19th Century, scientists were proving
that invisible forces did in fact surround us.
Electricity was harnessed, radiation was discovered.
There were a lot of factors why spiritualism took off,
people wanted to comprehend the invisible side of life.
I question how spiritualism can move forward in the 21st Century.
As I moved on with the project I just kept playing
with the idea of photography,
handling the part of making the visual of the invisible experience.
I find that even though Spiritualism is not as common
in culture, mediumship is alive and well,
playing with technology trying to create new ways to produce ectoplasm
or other manifestations to prove life after death.
What spiritualism was doing was nothing new.
In every time, in every country, in every era,
human beings have sought communication with the dead.