It is a commonplace claim to contend that the invention of photography changed the way we see. While arguably true, it's also true that upon photography's public introduction in 1839 the realm of the visible expanded rapidly into what seemed to be the fantastical. What must it have been like for a woman in 1840 to see a picture of herself as she was the day before? What was it like to look at a photograph of a recently deceased relative? Surely some small magic such as time travel or necromancy had occurred in the camera. We still get glimpses of what experiencing this magic is like when a child looks at a photo of herself for the first time.

There is something ghostly about all photographs; the nostalgia attached to a lost time and place, captured in complete detail with none of the lively attributes. As Roland Barthes wrote in Camera Lucida, "the photograph tells me death in the future." Or, as Raymond Bellour puts it, in photography "time returns to us brushed by death."

Early portrait sitters held still for the long exposure, with a stiff pose similar to that of a corpse. The photograph embalmed the subject in silver nitrate. On the other hand, someone could pass in front of the camera without making the slightest impression on the photographic plate, thus effectively disappearing.

It was not long before people began to experiment with photography's more "magical" properties and manipulate images with some degree of precision, creating so-called "spirit photographs." Because of the perceived passivity of the process -- the photographer hits the button and the camera merely records what appears before it -- the photo came to be trusted as the ultimate in visual evidence. This trust was all the easier to exploit in photography's infancy, when strange, foreign, and rare things were newly visible because of the new technology.

A short slideshow ramble through photography's long relationship with death follows. Ghosts, corpses, and skeletons abound in these photos. Not every photograph is a proven fraud. All I ask when you look at these pictures is to imagine seeing them for the first time. Would you believe that you could take a picture of the human skeleton without breaking skin? If your father brought home a hazy picture of your deceased mother, would you believe in ghosts?

1. The earliest extant photograph, made in 1826 by Joseph NicÉphore NiÉpce. NiÉpce considered his early images too ghostly to be revealed to the public.



2. Louis Daguerre's 1938 "View of the Boulevard du Temple" was the first to show a person. Because of the long exposure time, the only person visible on this busy street is the man getting his boots polished on the corner. Everyone else disappeared.



3. People did not only want pictures of the living, but also the recently deceased. Similar to death masks, these photos were a final remembrance of the loved one's earthly image. Post-mortem photography was commonly practiced through the early 20^th century.



4. With infant mortality rates high by today's standards, post-mortem photographs of infants were quite popular.



5. In 1862 a Bostonian photographer, William H. Mumler, discovered a transparent figure in the background of a photograph he had taken. Spiritualism -- the belief in communication with ghosts from the beyond -- was already popular, as were post-mortem photographs. Mumler recognized the financial potential of "spirit photography" and started charging ten bucks for the opportunity to be photographed with a ghost. Of course, he could never guarantee that a ghost would materialize.



6. Mumler was tried for fraud in 1869, but was acquitted on the grounds that he was only a passive medium through which the ghosts appeared. However, many of the "ghosts" in his photographs were proven to be alive-and-well former patrons of Mumler's.



7. Spirit photographs lent credence to the spiritualist movement and attracted the interest of famous men. On the occasion of Mumler's trial, P. T. Barnum commissioned this photograph of himself with Lincoln's ghost to show how a spirit photograph could be easily faked.



8. On the other hand, renowned scientist Sir William Crookes, inventor of the vacuum tube that bears his name, took these photographs of famous spirit Katie King.



9. Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle shown here shaking hands. Doyle, creator of the world's most rational detective and a man of medicine, also believed in spirit photography despite his friend Houdini's arguments otherwise. Doyle's History of Spiritualism, published in 1926, contains a whole chapter on Katie King and Crookes. Professional entertainers such as Barnum & Houdini could see through the trickery, though more "rational" men were easily fooled.



10. When experimenting with a modified Crookes-tube in a light-tight box, the German scientist Wilhelm RÖntgen discovered light where there should be none. He began researching what he called X-rays -- for "unknown ray." It wasn't long that he discovered what they could do, and took this photograph of his wife's hand.



11. R Öntgen was not the first to observe the effects of X-rays, but he was the first to recognize the importance of their discovery. Nikola Tesla, another believer in the occult, had been experimenting with X-rays in 1887 when he worked for Thomas Alva Edison.



12. Luckily for Tesla, he abandoned his X-ray experiments early on. Edison's assistant Clarence Dally was not so lucky. Edison and Dally experimented with X-rays extensively, placing their hands directly between the fluroscope and the X-ray tube in order to watch the X-rays in real time. Eventually Dally lost both his arms to X-ray burns and his life to cancer. Edison was quoted in a 1903 article in the New York World: "Don't talk to me about X-rays. I am afraid of them. I stopped experimenting with them two years ago, when I came near to losing my eyesight and Dally, my assistant practically lost the use of both of his arms."



13. Today, X-rays belong to the world of science and medicine, spirit photographs to the world of photographic fakery. Of course, there has always a shared aesthetic between the two disparate genres: flesh rendered transparently, bones and skulls, and the heavy connotation of death. However, in the end the spirit-photograph is only as powerful as the emotion it elicits; it's the X-rays that can kill you.

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