Ghosts, specters, and the occult have mesmerized photographers since the beginning of photographic history. More than a century before digital manipulation, there were countless attempts to use the “medium” (see what I did there?) to prove the existence of spiritual phenomena. Early images ranged from depictions of phantoms and janky, ghost-like blobs to abstract representations of spirits on X-rays, cyanotypes, and other light-sensitive materials. In 2005, the Metropolitan Museum of Art curated The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, an exhibition and corresponding book surveying occult photography from the 1860s through the 1940s, a period in which photographs were often used as “evidence” of the spirit world.
As a kid, before falling in love with photography, horror movies shaped much of my visual language and how I thought about the construction of narratives. Ultimately, they paved the way for a more recent obsession with occult-ridden images—everything from representations of ghosts and auras to the “unnatural” world of spiritual symbolism and the mystical unknown. (I’d even include campy, intentionally faked images of gore.)
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For Halloween, decades into the digital world, I’ve compiled 31 contemporary photographs ranging from apparitions and dark matter to witchcraft as a metaphor for our current political climate. While many of them nod to classic traditions of spirit photography, they also come from a now long-standing acceptance of photography as flawed in its representation of truth, and—often with a heavy dose of self-aware irony—function more as theater than any attempt to prove that ghosts are real.
