Customer Review: An Indicator of a far Less Sophisticated Time (from Ahadada Books)

I've been using this book along with Deborah Blum's Ghost Hunters in my classes at Waseda University, and one immediately notices the disparity between verbal descriptions of the evidence that convinced the Victorian savants that certain mediums and types of phenomena were "genuine" and the photographic evidence that helped to convince them as lavishly reproduced in this volume. Indeed, we must hold in abeyance our own sophisticated knowledge of special effects in this age of paint shop and Star Wars to keep from laughing out loud at the crude hoaxes that went far to convince such obviously intelligent people as the scientist William Crookes and the naturalist Alfred Wallace to accept the existence of the supernatural based on this kind of material. Then, of course, there are the clearer, more obviously "staged," self-defined hoaxes as well, created to educate and amuse the dupes and the skeptics, respectively, and some great examples are included in this section of the book. If these things, along with the assorted, regurgitated bolts of cloth or glowing strings of muslin drawn from the nasal cavity and draped over the forehead or plucked from the groin or anus of a medium and held fluttering at the end of a wire in the claustrophobic darkness of the seance room were actually considered "proof" then we must suspect that just about every account of things seen and experienced that have come down to us in "scientific" investigative narratives of the 19th and early 20th centuries to be tainted with this same sort of innocence. This would include such remarkable cases as D.D. Home and even Mrs. Piper and her cross-correspondences. Of course, I'm not suggesting that any of these well-meaning investigators willfully tried to misrepresent what they saw, but I suspect that genuine inexperience both with observing and keeping tabs on their subjects, as well as an undeveloped understanding of abnormal psychology, as well--dare I say it?--the will to believe,--skewed their observations. The creation of a self-consistent narrative covered these observational defects, and imposed a patina of believability on the phenomena described. The infamous Cottingly fairies are included as an index as to just how far the will to believe could push the gullibility of intelligent people, along with such near pornographic seance room shots as the extruding of a sheep's lung (think "spirit hand")from the navel--or perhaps lower--of the attractive Margery the medium, her delta of venus barely covered with a gentleman's handkerchief. Having said this, however, one series of photographs from the 1940's taken in England that includes a levitating table and a near chaotic snap of one of the circle apparently being roughly thrown or catpulted into the air over the heads of the others, gives one pause. The essays in this book are scholarly, well-documented, and good to great. Highly recommended even if a little pricey.

Customer Review: superb

what was the predecessor of photoshop and who were its magicians and muses. this compendium sheds lite on a period in which as mysterious as photography was it was meant to capture "reality." The reality that it captured was one of ghosts and spirits, for the believers a true testament of what lay beyond. for those behind the camera it lay the groundwork for artist such as ryszard horowitz and others who just as theoretical physicists who bend the time/space continuum these artist where the first to blur the line of what is real and surreal.

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