Victorian Spirit Photography

I am really interested in the Victorian aesthetic as a theme for this project, when researching images for references for this I came across the images from Victorian spirit photography. This is a phenomena that came about in the Victorian era were real 'ghosts' where captured using film photography.  This was a controversial practise as skeptics argued that the images where created using a double exposure technique. However many people still believed the practise to be real ,leading to the success of spirit photographers such as William Mumler and Frederick Hudson.

Mumler was from Boston, an amateur engraver and photograph, who went into spirit photography after supposedly capturing the image of his dead cousin beside him while taking a self portrait. Mumler experienced highs and lows throughout his career as a spirit photographer, even being convicted of being a fraud and taken to court in 1868, although he was found not guilty. Frederick Hudson was an English spirit photographer from the 1870s, he worked alongside the medium Mrs Guppy, to connect with and supposedly photograph peoples lost relatives. Despite also experiencing controversy Hudson was able to continue his career, and the practise of spirit photography on film would continue well into the 1930s. 

Whether these images are truly ghostly apparitions caught on film or cleverly doctored images using double exposures ,the images still produce a very interesting aesthetic and a marriage between the mundane and the occult. This kind of sense of something lingering is what I am interested in capturing within my own work for this project, and seeing this merged with the Victorian aesthetic creates a striking image