Are Photographs Truthful Whence Veracity

For decades, people have made certain assumptions about photographs, the primary one being that they are truthful in depicting reality. While this is true in many cases, it is not always so. This book traces the rise of photography’s perceived veracity. It shows why a combination of pre-knowledge of early developments in imagery, a persistent marketing campaign espousing the accuracy of photographs and a perception by users that what they got from their photographs was an accurate depiction acted to create the belief in the photograph’s veracity. The book uses philosophy, physiology, psychology and photography to tell this story and concludes by describing a system of identification that could be used to separate images that are not always what they seem. The turbulence caused to photography with the introduction of digital imaging is described and is the impetus for the beginning of the discussion about where photography sits today amongst other images.

No one theory of time is pursued in the essays of this volume, but a major theme that threads them together is Wolfson’s signature idea of the timeswerve as a linear circularity or a circular linearity, expressions that are meant to avoid the conventional split between the two temporal modalities of the line and the circle.

"Can the camera show us those who have passed on? Yes!" Arthur Conan Doyle said upon publishing The Case For Spirit Photography in 1923. The book offers a thorough account of his own experiences with spirit photography and those of others. The first spirit photographer, William Mumler, began working in Boston in 1861. Faint figures believed to be lost loved ones appeared in photos behind those sitting in front of the camera. Over the years, Mumler took thousands of spirit photographs, including one of Mary Todd Lincoln showing the assassinated president behind her. P.T. Barnum, always one to enjoy a good humbug, was intrigued as well and displayed several Mumler photographs in his American Museum. But with growing success came more skeptics. And eventually, some of them noticed that several spirits were actually people still living. By 1869, the police were on the case and claimed Mumler was swindling people out of their money. The spirit photographer went to court, supported by the Spiritualist community who maintained their belief that he was innocent and genuine. Mumler was exonerated when no one could prove he'd faked his photos. His legal troubles ultimately hurt his business, but spirit photography lived on through other mediums wielding otherworldly cameras. Doyle believed many of them to be genuine and often came to the defense of photographers accused of fraud. He had been one of Spiritualism's loudest and best-known evangelists in the early twentieth century. He, and its millions of followers, believed that we never die-we merely move on to another plane that could amazingly be captured on film. The author's good friend, Harry Houdini, spent many years exposing fraudulent mediums that capitalized on Spiritualism and people's willingness to believe that the dead could talk. One example was spirit photographer Alexander Martin of Denver, Colorado. Doyle told Houdini that he was "a very wonderful man in his particular line." So the magician paid him a visit, and once inside the studio he attempted to explore the dark room. After a few secretive photographic shenanigans, Martin shared some ghosts. Houdini concluded the photos were simply double exposures. "From a logical, rational point of view, Spirit photography is a most barefaced imposition and stands as evidence of the credulity of those who are in sympathy with the superstitions of occultism," he wrote in 1924's A Magician Among the Spirits. "It is also evidence of how unscrupulous mediums become and how calloused their consciences." Doyle clearly disagreed. Genuine or not, the stories presented within these pages are fascinating and a hundred years later the photos remain extraordinary. And they are faithfully reproduced as published in 1923.

The first English-language publication of a classic French book on the relationship between the development of photography and of the medical category of hysteria. In this classic of French cultural studies, Georges Didi-Huberman traces the intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry and photography in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the immense photographic output of the Salpetriere hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for insane and incurable women, Didi-Huberman shows the crucial role played by photography in the invention of the category of hysteria. Under the direction of the medical teacher and clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, the inmates of Salpetriere identified as hysterics were methodically photographed, providing skeptical colleagues with visual proof of hysteria's specific form. These images, many of which appear in this book, provided the materials for the multivolume album Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere. As Didi-Huberman shows, these photographs were far from simply objective documentation. The subjects were required to portray their hysterical "type"—they performed their own hysteria. Bribed by the special status they enjoyed in the purgatory of experimentation and threatened with transfer back to the inferno of the incurables, the women patiently posed for the photographs and submitted to presentations of hysterical attacks before the crowds that gathered for Charcot's "Tuesday Lectures." Charcot did not stop at voyeuristic observation. Through techniques such as hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and genital manipulation, he instigated the hysterical symptoms in his patients, eventually giving rise to hatred and resistance on their part. Didi-Huberman follows this path from complicity to antipathy in one of Charcot's favorite "cases," that of Augustine, whose image crops up again and again in the Iconographie. Augustine's virtuosic performance of hysteria ultimately became one of self-sacrifice, seen in pictures of ecstasy, crucifixion, and silent cries.