Mirror of Race

Image 74, Interpretive essay

September 12, 2011

<Image 1. Spirit Photograph, Mirror of Race, image 74>

A spirit photograph.  An imagined encounter between the living and the dead rendered in the soft brown tones of an albumen print.  The upper torso of a young white man fills the lower half of the frame.  He sports a large patterned tie looped around a stiff white collar, tucked under vest and jacket.  A wide mustache anchors his delicate features.  His light eyes and combed-back hair shine in the illumination of the studio.  He turns his head away from the camera to focus on a distant point outside the frame.  He is rendered in sharp focus, and stands out distinctly from the hazy background.  Over the man’s left shoulder hovers the face of a boy.  His head is a disembodied, slightly transparent orb.  His ear just touches the man’s temple, and their bodies seem to overlap and intermingle at the point of contact.  The boy is posed parallel to the man, at the same angle to the camera, and he appears to gaze out of the frame at the same distant point.  His delicate features closely resemble those of his elder counterpart, and his hair is parted and slicked back in just the same manner, but his eyes are dark, entirely lacking in luster.  The upper half of the photograph is dominated by the face of an elderly Native American man, with lined forehead, and solemn stare, and sharply down-turned mouth.  He resembles Sitting Bull, the famous Lakota chief known for his prescient visions, who resisted U.S. attempts to forcefully acquire land in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory in the 1870s.  His head emerges from a dark and indistinct background, and looms larger than those of the other subjects.  He is the only figure that seems to engage the gaze of viewers.  Resting on slightly different axes, one eye looks directly out at us, while the other drifts toward the distant point gazed upon by the white man and boy.  Within the logic of nineteenth-century spirit photography, the image suggests an otherworldly encounter between a living man and his departed son, facilitated by a Native-American spirit guide.

Spirit photography was a well-known, if not ubiquitous, practice by the late-nineteenth century in the United States.  In 1861, William Mumler began to make spirit photographs in his Boston studio with the assistance of his clairvoyant wife, Hannah.[i]  The images were much sought after, and within several years Mumler opened a studio on lower Broadway in New York City, asking ten dollars per sitting during an era in which ordinary studio photographs sold for 25 cents.[ii]  Mumler’s spirit photographs remained popular commodities until he was put on trial for fraud in 1869, at which point they became a matter of heated debate among Spiritualists and photographers alike.  Ultimately, Mumler triumphed.  Even though the judge declared spirit photography to be a form of deception, he ruled in favor of Mumler, arguing that the prosecution had failed to make a convincing case.[iii]  Mumler continued to practice spirit photography into the 1870s.

<Image 2. William H. Mumler, “John J. Glover with the Spirit of His Mother,” c. 1871.  The J. Paul Getty Museum 84.XD.760.1.6>

Spirit photographs engaged many of the hopes and anxieties that informed the wide-ranging practice of photography in the nineteenth century.  From the moment of its invention, commentators noted photography’s ability to capture more than the naked eye alone could see.  The camera could register detail and still motion in extraordinary ways, and the photograph enabled viewers to contemplate scenes for an extended period of time.  In this way, photography literally expanded the visible world, making it possible to see beyond the limitations of human sight.

Spiritualists in the nineteenth century played on photography’s capacity to capture worlds beyond natural human sight, proposing that the camera might also record a supernatural realm beyond the range of ordinary vision.  In his introduction to Photographing the Invisible, published in 1911, James Coates notes the many material but invisible things that can be photographed, such as the interior of the body seen with x-rays or stars made visible with telescopes.  He then proclaims that immaterial things can also be photographed:  “In addition to invisible objects, persons – some of whom are departed, and hence no longer clothed in the vesture of the flesh, or existing on the present plane of sense perception – have been photographed.”[iv]

<Image 3. Edouard Isidore Buguet, “Mr. Gueret from a portrait recognizes his drowned borther,” 1873–75, albumen print, carte de visite, Sirot-Angel Collection, Paris>

Spirit photographs appealed to a wide range of believers and non-believers.  Spiritualists suggested that, when placed in the right hands, the camera could function as a sensitive “medium,” recording the presence of spirits otherwise invisible to the human eye.  Others proclaimed spirit photographs to be a hoax, recognizing the photograph’s capacity to be manipulated through double exposures.  As the case of French spirit photographer Édouard Isidore Buguet attests, however, the purported veracity of the images did not necessarily determine their commercial success.  Buguet, unlike Mumler, did not win his own fraud case, and was forced to reveal the secrets of his process during his trial.  As he explained, he produced double exposures.  He would first photograph a dummy cloaked in a gauze veil, with an enlarged picture of a face resembling the departed attached at the head.  He would then expose the same negative again when he photographed his living subject.  Even after he disclosed his deception, however, many of his customers continued to proclaim the truth[L1]  of his spirit photographs.[v]   Soon after the trial, Buguet announced his new practice as an “anti-spirit” photographer, and continued to make exactly the same kind of images for eager consumers.[vi]  Those who did not believe in the truth of spirit photographs might nevertheless find comfort in them as memento mori, as objects that memorialized the dead.[vii]  And some simply enjoyed the joke[L2] .

In the spirit photograph at hand, one can imagine a father communicating with (or simply commemorating) his departed son.  But this reunion of spirit takes place under the guiding authority of a Native American man who resembles Sitting Bull.  How does one explain his presence in this photograph, and what is his role in this encounter?

<Image 4. William H. Mumler, “Mrs. S. A. Floyd with Native American Spirit,” 1862–75.  The J. Paul Getty Museum 84.XD.760.1.31>

Native American “spirits” figured in spirit photographs with some regularity.  As Molly McGarry has demonstrated, “Relying on a cultural understanding of Native Americans as highly spiritual, and mapping onto the spirit world the colonial relationship of the Indian as a guide for the white man, Spiritualists positioned Native Americans as a vital link between this world and the next.  It was the Indian guide who could bring Spiritualists through the veil, tracing the invisible footprints beyond.”[viii]  Given their prominence in the worldview of Spiritualists, it is not surprising that Native Americans would begin to appear in spirit photographs.  The Native American that looms over the spiritual reunion depicted in this image functions as the guide who joins the living with the dead.  Importantly, he does not emerge to comfort or communicate with his own relatives, but to suture the natural and supernatural worlds for a young white family.

Native Americans were posed as “American” ancestors in a wide range of cultural discourses in the late-nineteenth century United States.  As Alan Trachtenberg has argued[L3] , white Americans appropriated the image and idea of the Native American as part of their American heritage, precisely at the moment in which they also deemed Native Americans to be vanishing from the present, and erased them from a viable future.  In this period white Americans relegated Native Americans to an imagined past and claimed them for Euro-American history.[ix]  Such narratives sought to legitimize the course of American Manifest Destiny and the policy of Indian Removal as natural processes rather than aggressive military operations.  Spiritualists participated in such racialized logics, and as McGarry has argued, “As Spiritualists appropriated Native Americans as ancestors, precursors, and spiritual teachers, they consistently projected these spirits into an afterworld that both rationalized and validated Indians’ passing from this world.”[x]  If this is, in fact, an image of Sitting Bull, the appropriation at work is extreme, for it imagines a famous Native American warrior who resisted Euro-American colonization reconfigured as a spiritual forebear and guide for a white father and son.  He no longer serves the spiritual life of his own people, but instead presides over the spiritual communion of white people who claim him as their American ancestor.

This spirit photograph is thus more than a fascinating oddity.  It engages nineteenth-century debates about the nature and reach of photography, the presence of spirits and their material manifestations, and the racial contours of an American past, present, and future.

* * *

Spirit photographs draw attention to the association of photography with death that would preoccupy many twentieth-century scholars.  Roland Barthes famously described the process of being photographed as a kind of small death.  In Camera Lucida he states, “The Photograph … represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object:  I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis):  I am truly becoming a specter.”[xi]  For Barthes, the photographic portrait is intrinsically a kind of spirit photograph, transforming its subject into a specter.  Indeed, Barthes saw death in all photographs:  “The photograph tells me death in the future.… Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”[xii]  The photographed subject always belongs to the past; the photograph preserves an instant already gone the moment the camera’s shutter closes.  In concert with Barthes, Eduardo Cadava has stated, “It is precisely in death that the power of the photograph is revealed, and revealed to the very extent that it continues to evoke what can no longer be there .… In photographing someone, we know that the photograph will survive him – it begins, even during his life, to circulate without him, figuring and anticipating his death each time it is looked at.  The photograph is a farewell.  It belongs to the afterlife of the photographed.”[xiii]  In this sense, spirit photographs might be considered the epitome of photography rather than an anomaly, revealing something of the photograph’s essential properties.

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland.  Camera Lucida:  Reflections on Photography.  Trans. Richard Howard.

New York:  Hill and Wang, 1981.

Batchen, Geoffrey.  Forget Me Not:  Photography and Remembrance.  New York:

Princeton Architectural Press and Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 2004.

Cadava, Eduardo.  Words of Light:  Theses on the Photography of History.  Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1997.

Chéroux, Clement.  “Ghost Dialectics:  Spirit Photography in Entertainment and Belief.”

In The Perfect Medium:  Photography and the Occult.  By Clément Chéroux,

Andreas Fischer, and Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem, Sophie Schmit.

New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2005.  45–55.

Cloutier, Crista.  “Mumler’s Ghosts.”  In The Perfect Medium:  Photography and the

Occult.  By Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, and Pierre Apraxine, Denis

Canguilhem, Sophie Schmit.  New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2005.  20–28.

Coates, James.  Photographing the Invisible.  London: L. N. Fowler and Co., 1911.

Gunning, Tom.  “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations:  Spirit Photography,

Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny.”  In Fugitive Images:

From Photography to Video.  Ed. Patrice Petro.  Bloomington:  Indiana

University Press, 1995. 42–71.

Kaplan, Louis.  The Strange Case of William Mumler Spirit Photographer.  Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

McGarry, Molly.  Ghosts of Futures Past:  Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of

Nineteenth-Century America.  Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2008.

Trachtenberg, Alan.  Shades of Hiawatha:  Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–

1930.  New York:  Hill and Wang, 2004.

While collecting slave photographs, I became fascinated with the “white slave children of Louisiana” as I call the series of CDV (carte-de-visite) photos of freed children from New Orleans who appear to be completely white. These small, cardboard-mounted photos were sold in great quantities by abolitionists during the Civil War. On the back of each photo was printed: “The nett [sic] proceeds from the sale of these Photographs will be devoted to the education of colored people in the Department of the Gulf, now under the command of Maj. Gen. Banks.”

When it arrived, I was stunned to find on page 73 a photo of Mary Botts that was the mirror image of MY dag. (The one in the book was from the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.) Prof. Mitchell gave more explanation about why this young girl was photographed and brought north by Charles Sumner. “By the eve of the Civil War, abolitionists recognized the potential of white-looking children for stirring up antislavery sentiment…Although it was the image of a raggedy, motherless Topsy that viewers might have expected to see in a photograph of a slave girl, it was the ‘innocent’, ‘pure,’ and ‘well-loved’ white child who appeared, a child who needed the protection of the northern white public.  

The sponsors of seven-year-old Mary Mildred Botts, a freed child from Virginia, may have been the first to capitalize on these ideas, as early as 1855. Her story also marks the beginning of efforts to use photography (in Mary Botts’s case, the daguerreotype, as the carte-de-visite format was not yet available) in the service of raising sentiment and support for the abolitionist cause.’’(Bold-facing mine.)

  “…In his own characterization of Mary Botts,” Mitchell continues, “Sumner set a pattern that other abolitionists would follow. In a letter printed in both the Boston Telegraph and the New York Daily Times, he compared Mary Botts to a fictional white girl who had been kidnapped and enslaved, the protagonist in Mary Hayden Pike’s antislavery novel Ida May: ‘She is bright and intelligent—another Ida May,’ [Sumner wrote] ‘I think her presence among us (in Boston) will be more effective than any speech I can make.’”
This comparison of Mary Botts to the fictional kidnapped white girl worked well for Sumner and the Abolitionists and made the little freed slave quite a local celebrity. Prof. Mitchell quotes the diary of a Quaker woman named Hannah Marsh Inman who saw Mary Botts at a meeting house in Worcester, MA (which happens to be where I live now). On March 1, 1855, Hannah wrote: “Evening all went to the soiree at the Hall. Little Ida May, the white slave was there from Boston.” Sumner realized that he was on to a good thing and circulated daguerreotypes of the child to prove her whiteness to those who might doubt. (Keep in mind—the daguerreotype process was the first one ever made available—by Daguerre in 1839– and the images “written by the sun” on the silvered copper plate were considered undeniable scientific proof of the sitter’s appearance.)  

Sumner passed a daguerreotype of Mary Botts around the Massachusetts State Legislature “as an illustration of slavery” and sent one to John. A. Andrews, the governor of Massachusetts. Only a year after parading Mary Botts through New York, Boston and Worcester and dubbing her “The real Ida May”, Charles Sumner’s devout abolitionist views led him to a crippling disaster, when, in 1856, he was so badly beaten on the floor of the Senate by South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks, who broke a cane over his head, that it would take years of therapy before Sumner could return to the Senate.

This is what made the narratives of white abolitionist martyrs so appealing to European-American audiences. While no one could argue that Walker suffered more than the slaves he tried to aid, his suffering appeared nobler, given that it was freely chosen. Like Christ, and unlike slaves who were forced or born into servitude, Walker chose his fate. Walker’s autobiography is filled with references to his chosen suffering and to the religious nature of his cause. He repeatedly wrote of “the act for which I was called to suffer;” “the misery and suffering of imprisonment;” the “severe” pain he endured during and after his branding, which he deemed part of “the most degrading punishments that human invention has produced.”(8) In his detailed recounting of the court-ordered branding, Walker described the scene in the following manner: “When about to be branded, I was placed in the prisoner’s box [in the courtroom]. The Marshall, Ebenezer Dora, formerly of Maine, proceeded to tie my hand to a part of the railing front. I remarked that there was no need of tying it, for I would hold still.”(9) It is a minor but telling detail that Walker recounts his willingness to compliantly present his hand for branding. As wrong as he believes the punishment ordered by the court to be, Walker accepts his sentence as something he is called on to stoically endure. A subsequent press account of his court case took pains to note that Walker, “on Christian grounds objects to any legal [appeal] proceedings in his own behalf, choosing to suffer wrong.”(10)

White accounts of Walker’s ordeal consistently presented him as a Christ-like figure who chose to suffer for the cause of abolition. Many of his supporters re-branded the “SS” scars to stand for “soul savior,” “slave savior,” or “salvation to the slave,” making Walker’s links to Christ even more clear by highlighting how black salvation hinged on his sacrifice. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier brought these links before a large reading public in “The Branded Hand” (1846), his famous tribute to Walker. In it he wrote that Walker’s “branded palm shall prophesy, ‘Salvation to the Slave!’” A heated essay appearing in the Boston Chronicle took the imagery a step farther in its conflation of Walker and Christ. The editors wrote of the branding: “This thing which ye have done unto the least of his little ones, ye have done unto Him who died for the slave. Into His hands, still bearing the nail-marks of the cross, have ye burned the literal signet of your malignity to man and human freedom.”(11) Given the like placement of Walker’s brand and the stigmata on Christ’s hands, few would have missed the visual analogy as Walker moved among abolitionist crowds at the conclusion of his talks, holding out his marked right palm for eager audiences in the 1840s.(12) So fixated was Walker on his own suffering, that the first edition of his 119-page published account of his exploits contains not a word on the fate of the seven men who set off with him from Florida. Several of them are not even named in the text. The enslaved men who enlisted Walker’s help, initiating the chain of events described in the autobiography, are inexplicably dropped from the narrative at the moment of Walker’s arrest.

We know from surviving accounts of Walker’s abolitionist talks that he would hold up his hand to audiences so that they might view his famous scars. At the conclusion of his lectures, one can imagine Walker passing among eager audiences, allowing men and women to take his middle-aged hand in their own to inspect the scars up close. Younger, less restrained, observers may even have touched the raised letters. The daguerreotype allowed this intimate ritual to be repeated by Bowditch and his associates at their leisure. Produced on a “ninth plate,” The Branded Hand was created on one of the smallest daguerreotype plates in circulation, measuring just 2 x 2.5 inches. Even with the inclusion of its protective casing, the framed image was diminutive. To see it clearly one needed to take it in hand; while women and children may have used both hands to cradle the daguerreotype, a man could easily have grasped it in one. To hold and study the daguerreotype is to see the stigma burned into the copper plate as a visual reminder of Walker’s ordeal, and to place an overlay of the “SS” brand across one’s own palm. For the elite, white viewers who cradled the daguerreotype, the mere desire to hold the image attested to their own abolitionist credentials, as it aligned Walker’s more famous hand with their own. With the superimposition of his “SS” scars on their palms, the daguerreotype may also have flattered viewers into imagining his or her own “suffering” (either emotional or financial) for the noble abolitionist cause. As it raised interest in and awareness of the fight against slavery, the Branded Hand daguerreotype helped to ensure that abolition would remain linked in the minds of white northerners to the dedication and suffering of European-Americans. In the odd logic of its day, the plight of blacks was publicized through attention to the experiences of whites whose more modest—and often imagined—suffering bore little relation to that experienced by millions of American slaves.

Martin A. Berger is Director of the Visual Studies Graduate Program and Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His most recent book is Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2011).

NOTES

(1) Jonathan Walker, The Branded Hand: The Trial and Imprisonment of Jonathan Walker, at Pensacola, Florida, for Aiding Slaves to Escape from Bondage (Boston: Anti-Slavery Society, 1848), 32.

(2) Walker, Branded Hand, 40.

(3) For engraved reproductions of the daguerreotype image, see “The Branded Hand,” Prisoner’s Friend: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Criminal Reform, Philosophy, August 13, 1845, 79; “The Man with the Branded Hand,” Zion’s Herald, July 12, 1899, 877; and the title page in each of Walker’s many editions of his autobiography The Branded Hand. For the popularity of newspaper engravings of the branded hand image, see Hazel Wolf, On Freedom’s Altar: The Martyr Complex in the Abolition Movement (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952), 67.

(4) “Communications: Jonathan Walker and John S. Jacobs on Sunday,” The North Star, March 31, 1848; “Walker Meeting in New Bedford,” The Liberator, August 22, 1845, 135.

(5) Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by Himself (New York: FQ Classics, 2007), 10; when John S. Jacobs published an account of his life in The Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation, the journal’s white editors prefaced his essay with their comment that “The writer of these autobiographical sketches has, since his escape from slavery, held positions of trust in free countries, and every statement may be relied on.” In “A True Tale of Slavery,” The Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation (February 7, 1861), 85.

(6) Maria Weston Chapman, The Liberty Bell (Boston: Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Fair, 1845), 205–06; Douglass quoted in “The Branded Hand,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 2, 1878, 1.

(7) Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2000), 243.

(8) Walker, Branded Hand, 101, 20, 40, 86.

(9) Walker, Branded Hand, 40–43.

(10) Walker, Branded Hand, 44; C.M. Bruleigh, “Tour on the Cape,” Liberator, February 28, 1845, 35.

(11) For whites’ reinterpretation of the “SS” branding, see Walker, Branded Hand, 108; “Walker Meeting in New Bedford,” The Liberator, August 22, 1845, 135; “Jonathan Walker,” Christian Reflector, August 21, 1845, 136; “The Branded Hand,” Liberator, September 5, 1845, 1; also, see Frank Edward Kittredge, “The Man with the Branded Hand,” The New England Magazine, November 1898, 369. “The Branded Hand,” Boston Chronicle, reprinted in Elihu Burritt, Sparks from the Anvil (London: Charles Gilpin, 1847), 97–98.

(12) [Anti-Slavery Society], The Branded Hand, pamphlet #9 (Philadelphia: Anti-Slavery Society, c.1846), 34. For abolitionist’s empathetic imaginings of themselves and their family members as suffering slaves, see Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolition: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), 237–39, 242.