ABSTRACT
Humbug! Fraud! Flim-flam! Bullshit! These are the exclamatory epithets issued in four-part harmony proclaimed by the doubters and debunkers of spirit photography and the wondrous manifestations of Spiritualism in general. Over the past 150 years, the record shows that some of the leading opponents of spirit photographic phenomena in Anglo-American photo-cultural history have been masters of visual entertainment and illusionists themselves – magicians, escape artists, showmen, and pranksters.1 Each episode in this history of spirit photographic doubt provides a fascinating case study wherein a renowned illusionist and/or stage magician has worked to discredit the photographer who has asserted the occult significance of his or her images. Assuming an arch-materialist philosophical position, these skeptical ghostbusters have framed spirit photography as a type of “mechanical illusionism,” and they have refused to acknowledge the possibility of any attempt to think of photography as a supernatural phenomenon.2 It is clear that these noted purveyors of visual entertainment have profited from the publicity that they have gained in promoting themselves as champions of the truth who fight against photographic frauds and fakes and from the spectacles that they have thus created. In mounting these attacks, they have relied, paradoxically, on their own areas of expertise in magic, sleight of hand, and the mechanics of illusion to expose the material basis of the purported phenomena of those who invoke the divine, miraculous, or paranormal in their photographic practices.
