FACES OF THE LIVING DEAD: THE BELIEF IN SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHY

FACES OF THE LIVING DEAD: THE BELIEF IN SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHY by Martyn Jolly. Mark Batty Publisher/160 pp./?20.00 (hb).

In the wake of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's lauded exhibition, "The Perfect Medium," Martyn Jolly's Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography provides an

intriguing and further contribution to the subject. Both the catalog to "The Perfect Medium" and Jolly's text begin with a similar history chronicling the roots of the Spiritualist Movement in the aftermath of the Civil War. Fueled by a longing for reunion and remembrance for those who had been lost, spirit photography offered tangible proof of the deceased tactilely present, emulsified upon a glass plate.

However, where the interest of "The Perfect Medium" is in the collision between photography and the occult, Jolly's focus is more narrowly, historically focused as he adeptly weaves together the key players between the heyday of both the American and European movement (c. 1870-1930), which he describes as a period in which "gullible clients, cunning mediums, opportunistic mentors and hubristic investigators created a rich imaginative economy where ideas, images and interpretations circulated, cross-infected and interpenetrated each other" (144). As a reader, I found myself captivated by the deception, and felt a kinship to the witnesses in the infamous 1875 trial of spirit photographer ?douard Buguet. For, even after they were told how Buguet had created his duplicitous images, they still chose to believe. Ultimately, Jolly reminds us how all portrait photographs can be understood within the realm of spirit photography, binding the living to the deceased, lived experience with memory.