Faces of the Living Dead: The belief in spirit photography
Miegunyah Press, $49.95 hb, 153 pp
Photography
Auras of the dearly departed
by Isobel Crombie •
Photography has always had a close relationship with death, indeed one of the more poignant catch cries of early portrait photography exhorted clients to ‘secure the shadow, before the substance fade’. An intriguing part of this emotionally charged territory is spirit photography – a sub-culture of photographs from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries that purport to show ectoplasms, ghosts and auras of the dearly departed.
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