Spirit photographs of the late 19th century, which depict people surrounded by the ghostly embodiments of the deceased, offered "space for the production of new narratives" to the living, said Dana Luciano, Ph.D. '99, in a lecture Oct. 1 in the A.D. White House to close the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies conference "Family Ties."

When spirit photography arose in the 1860s, many believed that the fuzzy figures surrounding a live sitter were "not visible when the camera clicked, but manifested when the photo was produced," said Luciano, an expert on 19th-century American literature and culture and associate professor at Georgetown University. They believed that the spirits were summoned by the presence of a medium -- in most cases, the photographer himself.

The "spirits" were often clearly recognized as loved ones -- children, parents or spouses of the sitter -- as in the famous spirit photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln with a gossamer figure of the dead Abraham Lincoln standing behind her.

Later in the century, however, when double exposure techniques became more widely known, spirit photographers strove less for realism. The ghosts appearing in their photographs would sometimes "press through or impose themselves over the bodies of the sitters," Luciano said, showing examples of a ghostly head superimposed on a man's lap in one photo and disembodied arms filling the background of another.

Although these ghostly manifestations of the dead provided comfort to the living, they were not treated "as melancholy testimony to the past's inaccessibility," Luciano argued. Spirit photography was viewed as "overflowing," she said, and it offered "new stories about the place of the body in time."

"Resistance to loss of loved ones is what marks us as human," she explained. "However, I do not consider spirit photography solely in the context of grief."

Luciano expressed less interest in the photographic trickery used to reveal spirits than on the effects of these spirits upon the living. "Whether the subject is real or fake, it depicts not an object but a world," she said. Spiritualists of the late 19th century treated these photographs as "death undoing," she said, and they discovered in them "a flow of posthumous time."

Luciano is the author of "Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in 19th-Century America" (NYU Press, 2007), which won a 2008 MLA Prize for a First Book. Her talk was the second annual Nineteenth-Century American Reading Group Alumni Lecture, co-sponsored by Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies; the Scoiety for the Humanities; and the Flora Rose House.

Graduate student Melissa Rice is a writer intern at the Cornell Chronicle.