One of the ghostly images on view at the
Stephen Cohen Gallery's "Immaterial World.".

As fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini know, there was a craze for mediums, spiritualists, and séances in the Victorian Era that extended into the early 20^th Century (Doyle extolled them; Houdini debunked them). Most of the photographs on display in the gallery date from this era – allegedly authentic attempts to capture ghosts on camera. To the modern eye, trained by watching decades of trick photography and high-tech special effects, the images are notably unconvincing, but they do provide an interesting insight into a time when many took seriously the concept that the dead could return and commune with the living.

At first glance, these centuries-old photos seem disappointing, not the least because of their diminutive size. Most are 4.125 by 2.5 inches; the black-and-white rectangles almost look as if they could have been clipped from a newspaper, and there is little of the uncanny obviously apparent in their frequently stiff poses and sometimes crude trickery.And yet, they have a cumulative impact, as perusing them draws you back into another world – not so much the Great Beyond as the Great Back Then, a time when techology and believe combined to create a peculiar form of art masquerading as factual evidence.

Several photographs by John Beattie purport to show unformed “apparitions” that appear as nothing more than blobs of light (presumably meant to be ectoplasm). To the modern eye, the effect looks like little more than a mistake – the sort of thing that happens when you accidentally expose film to light.

More bizarre, if not more convincing, are photographs of a ghostly manifestation of a departed relative emanating from a medium’s nose. The alleged ectoplasm resembles solid material, and the impression one receives is of a freakshow stunt, with performer forcing a cloth out of her nose.

In other cases, the supernatural element is so subtle as to go almost unnoticed without close inspection. For example, “The White Cross” by Frederick Hudson looks like nothing more than a portrait of medium Georgiana Houghton, until you note the tiny cross floating above her head – an image that we would now interpret as an obvious artistic statement made by the photographer about his subject.

Hudson’s other work is more interesting, hewing closer to our standard concept of supernatural manifestations. A set of three photographs, listed as #10 on the gallery catalogue (including “Mrs. Guppy, Medium; Dr. Cargill & Spirit of his Sister), present shrouded figures that seem to deliberately evoke the image of a ghost as seen at Halloween: a person with a sheet draped over his head. Other images (such as “Miss Rose Hudson, Medium; Mr. Adshead & Brother”) go even further, to depict spectral figures floating in the air.

One readily apparent element of Hudson’s work is the stiff quality of the poses (the result of the long exposure time of 19^th Century photography, which required subjects to hold their positions to avoid blurring the image). In several cases, the living humans strike typical Victorian poses – seated at a chair, hand resting on a table, gazing indifferently into the middle distance – while totally oblivious to the transparent figures occupying the frame with them.

The work of W. Parkes, like that of Beattie, features some “apparitions” that look like non-descript blobs of energy, but there is also a nice one of a floating woman facing a wide-eyed man. The distinguishing feature is that the woman is visible only from the waist up, emphasizing her disembodied state.

A set of three photographs entitled “The Ghost of Bernadette Soubirons (#19 in the catalogue) improve on the stiff poses of Hudson’s images, actually suggesting action, with a pair of children conducting a séance and visibly reacting to the ghostly figure they summon. The effect still looks staged for the camera, resembling a set of publicity photographs for a scary silent movie.