Photography

Auras of the dearly departed

Item: Faces of the Living Dead
Author: Isobel Crombie

by Isobel Crombie •

November 2006, no. 286

Faces of the Living Dead: The belief in spirit photography by Martyn Jolly

Miegunyah Press, $49.95 hb, 153 pp

Photography

Auras of the dearly departed

by Isobel Crombie •

November 2006, no. 286

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.

Isobel Crombie

Isobel Crombie has worked as a Curator of Photography since 1979. She began her career at the National Gallery of Australia and, since 1988, has been Senior Curator, Photography, National Gallery of Victoria. She regularly curates exhibitions on the history of Australian and International photography and has published widely on aspects of the medium. Recent publications include, Body Culture: Max Dupain, Photography and Australian Culture, 1919-1939 (2004); Light Sensitive: Contemporary Australian Photography from the Loti Smorgon Fund (2006); Body Language: Contemporary Chinese Photography (2008); Re-view: 170 years of photography (2009); and Fred Kruger: Intimate Landscapes (2012).