September 05, 2005
Occult photography as art!
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is having an exhibition of old (and fairly new) photographs that purport to show spirits.
While the museum admits its an unusual subject for an art exhibition, they argue that the photographs enjoy a special place in the history of photography. The images, while they may have been faked, are often eerie and beautiful. I wish I were in NYC to see this exhibition!
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This picture is from the Cottingley Fairies Hoax. I hope my comment doesn't come off the wrong way, it's an interesting link-worthy subject, but as the New York Times link didn't work for me for some reason, I would hope that the commentary for these pictures would point out that they are bunk. There was rampant fraud by spiritualists from the late 1800s into the early 1900s, for which this is good evidence. (Well, there is still spiritualist fraud to these days still, but that was a fairly unique period).
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The link doesn't work? How odd... (I previewed it and it worked, but NYT links are so funky, it may have only worked because I had it in my cookies? I dunno.) Here's a mention of the exhibit in Boing Boing (I should have cited them as my source from the beginning!) They also have the NYT link, maybe it'll work for you from there. Here's the NYT story as linked off of Google Here's an abriged version of the story from the Taipei Times (which used the NYT news wire) Here's the Met's press release about the exhibition I agree that this area of photography is rife with kooks and fakers. That makes it more interesting to me, to be honest :) While I do admit that there is more to life than the physical, I also think that most "evidence" of this fact has been a hoax. The history of these pictures, hoaxed or not, is fascinating. As a researcher for the exhibit states in an interview with a Florida newspaper, "We didn't see our main role as debunking," says Mia Fineman, a Met senior research associate who is organizing the show for the museum. "It has to do with . . . wanting to deal with the photographs in historical terms, talking about how they were conceived at the time that they were made and how they were presented."