Blur of the Otherworldly

Magic Shop

My friend Calla loves magic tricks, especially simple ones involving coins, cards, cups, and little foam balls. We live in Baltimore and sometimes visit a magic shop in the Federal Hill neighborhood. The shop windows are appropriately scratched and filmy, and behind them clumps of decaying circus artifacts are displayed. Impossibly long and bulbous clown shoes, a life-size model of a seal balancing a ball on its nose, hoops-and-lion posters, a yellowing picture of a bearded lady. This magic shop is the kind of place that might be featured in a John Waters movie and makes me glad that I live in a city that has yet to be homogenized by uncontrolled gentrification.

The store’s current owners are a middle-aged couple, both of whom are professional clowns, formerly with the Barnum and Bailey circus. The wife is quite short, almost Munchkin short, and runs excitedly around the shop trying to sell you a rubber rat, a whoopee cushion, or spicy hot chewing gum. They have a teenage son who is a bit of a local celebrity. He is a magician and ventriloquist and he is totally Vegas. Like a Diane Arbus photograph of a precocious child attempting to pass as an adult. He is a miniature Wayne Newton with his V-neck black sweater, double-breasted silver suit coat, onyx rings, and chunky bracelets. His father, all anxious to entertain and impress the very occasional customers who enter his store, persistently orders his son to perform tricks from his adolescent repertoire. With a barely perceptible expression of insurrection crossing his always pleasant, made-for-TV face, the son responds like an unquestioning marionette. Pulling up his sleeves, he winks at his audience and unveils his razzle-dazzle.

The last time we visited this little shop of abracadabra, as Calla busied herself with the mysteries held in the glass cases, I noticed the young magician and an unidentified older man huddled in a corner, whispering and glancing in my direction. I tried to ignore the stares and surveyed the merchandise until they approached and bracketed me from either side. With surprising deference they inquired whether I was a certain well-known French-Canadian magician whose first name was Cliff. I said that I was not. They were stunned at the close resemblance and did not seem convinced by my denial.

“He has incredible powers, very eccentric. He is the son of a tailor, and all of his illusions have to do with lapels, cuffs, and sleeves.”

They both stared as if expecting me to finally admit my true identity.

“Sorry, I am not the son of a tailor.”

The teenager ran off to the store basement to thumb through back issues of a professional magician magazine to find a picture of my doppelganger.

The older man, still deferential, asked me if he could show me his work and then, as if he were uttering some ancient mystical secret, claimed that he no longer considered himself a magician but was now a “mentalist.” On the glass display case he spread out his cards and asked me to cut the deck.

“Pick out one card-but don’t look at it,” he ordered.

We locked gazes, plugging into each other ‘s eyes.

“Now think of a numerical card. Not a picture card, a number card.”

As soon as he said this I felt as if the number three was physically inserted in the front’ right quadrant of my brain, I could not even imagine another number. I tried to pick five or seven or two, but it was impossible, the three insisted, pulsating with my blood.

THREE. THREE. THREE. THREE.

“Turn the card over.”

I did as I was commanded it was the three of spades. A somewhat muffled yelp leapt from my mouth and, just as that pathetic sound hung in the air, Wayne Newton, Jr., returned with a magazine open to a contrasty black-and-white photograph of a man who looked exactly like me.

“Look, it’s you,” he said.

Dark Chamber

Photography must have dark places. While it seeks the light for its images, it requires the dark for its transformations. Photography flits about the bright world like a nervous bird, anxious to return to its shadowy nest. Photography pilfers luminescence, stealing a handful of photons for each exposure, entrapping them in the sticky membrane of emulsion. (The nineteenth century wet collodion process was literally sticky.) For spirits to appear, for ectoplasm to emanate, for UFOs to descend, darkness is essential. In light’s absence unannounced visitors are free to float in the air like spilt milk and are more agreeable to being photographed. Black cloths and safe lights, apertures and sensitivities, filters and latent images: the glossary of photographic terms is suggestive of an entire world of between-ness. As Marina Warner has pointed out, the very word film resonates with notions of veiling, vapors, of the gauzy barrier between a parallel world and us.

For over twenty years I have taught photography classes in a variety of environments, from community art centers and universities to prep schools and inner-city high schools. I am especially fond of teaching introductory courses because the fundamental alchemy of the photographic process still retains the thrill of discovery. New photographers (at least those working with pre-digital technologies) become initiates in a society of conjurors, capturing images of the outside world, absorbing and condensing them into little black boxes, impressing life onto a concoction of silver and gelatin. Returning to their dark lairs to dip the freeze-dried souls into various potions, the photographic acolytes add a smidgen of light to catalyze the world back to life.

Beginning students are still entranced by the moment when a sheet of exposed photographic paper is placed in the developing bath and the image begins to mysteriously appear. The glossy whiteness, cast with the yellow or red of the darkroom’s safelight, begins to stir with a vague smoky shadow. A light gray deepens to gleaming anthracite, giving volume and depth to the image. Turn the overhead light on now and the image will be swallowed up in blackness. But leave it for a moment more, teasing out a subtle detail in the highlight: a face appears, a bit of a manicured lawn, a maple tree, and a front porch where your little brother pouts. After two minutes, a second bath of acid stops the development process and a third fixes the image, making the paper impervious to future contacts with light. This “magical” process is a cliché for photography teachers and a tired trope in media representations of photography. Nevertheless, it remains a real alchemical moment, one of the rare instances in our lives when we can witness an apparition, an invocation of a figure out of nothingness. The darkroom is a magic shop.

Student photographs are often mysterious, although perhaps nor in the ways intended. Inevitably some errant blotch of grayness or spreading, ectoplasmic, yellow stain threatens the transparency of the photographic window. Or the film turns out to be clear as cellophane, blank, empty, unexposed – not a thing inhabits its space, although the subject was romping around on a sunny day. In class or outside the darkroom, students cry, “What happened? What are those circles in the sky? What is that octagonal shape floating in the middle of the room? Where is that light coming from? Where is my father’s reflection in the mirror? Why does it seem to be nighttime at the beach at noon?” I attempt to demystify the process as much as possible. “Light leaks. Did you use the light meter? Was your film X-rayed? Did you leave the print in the fixer long enough?” But sometimes I am baffled myself: I may be teaching Beginning Photography, but I feel at times that I am an inept ghost buster, an incompetent debunker of the inherent mysteries of the medium.

Henri Bergson has described an image as something that exists halfway between a representation and the thing itself.  It is not just a lifeless sign, yet it is not quite life. The image lives at the threshold, standing between us and the abstractions we use to represent ourselves. The image is a window, a doorway, a passage between the flesh of our existence and the cluttered forest of signs we have invented to communicate our inchoate selves. Before photography: words, etchings, pottery shards, carvings in stone, the artifacts left by our ancestors, the concrete pieces of a puzzle with which we attempt to reconstruct their lives. With the invention of photography: the same fragments, but with the addition of an artifact of a different order, an image made in a specific moment in time by the reflective light emanating from a person, place, or object. Skins of light, photographs, the ghosts of our ancestors, the traces of lives lived and passed are not merely two-dimensional signs; they have a life of their own. An uncanny life, familiar yet estranged, perhaps like a life of shallow breath, not quite here, not quite gone. What is this half-life of photography? Spirits are “middle substances” between the soul and the body. Ghosts and angels are the diaphanous intermediaries between the human and the divine. Photographs haunt us not only as reminders of time past but also as what we desire for our futures (we want to live). Photographs are manifestations of what lies between our mortal temporary bodies and what we hope will be our eternal souls.

Aura

I visited a kind of New Age expo with an aroma therapist friend where small entrepreneurs of the alternative health care system convene to show off their wares and philosophies. Among the smudging sticks, Reiki practitioners, and crystal connoisseurs, one can find “Aura Imagists” equipped with “lnneractive” video stations. For a small introductory fee the imaging technology will reveal your “True Colors.” In our parallel research for a panel presented at the 2001 CAA conference, the artist Jane D. Marsching and I decided to investigate and experience this more contemporary form of spirit photography.

Two days after Christmas, we drove to a small town thirty miles north of Boston. Our directions had us pass to ever-smaller roads and finally to a long semi paved driveway that approached a formally elegant mansion now functioning as a long-term-care facility for the elderly. As directed, we pulled into the back and rang the bell at the basement door. A pleasant, middle-aged woman dressed in white tentatively opened the door, setting off a shrieking alarm that seemed to echo throughout the house. I wondered if a rash of sudden heart attacks upstairs would affect my aura palette. Padding down the antiseptic corridor, we were led to a small office whose bookshelves were lined with the literature of the current crop of psychic healers, among them Deepak Chopra (author of Ageless Body, Timeless Mind). Marianne Williamson (Enchanted Love: The Mystical Power of Intimate Relationships), and Caroline Myss (Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing). The authors of these books promise transcendence and in their various ways claim that history and fate can be rewritten and rerouted by individual and collective spiritual healing. Our spiritual guide on this day was a nurse’s aide who had paid ten thousand dollars for the equipment and software to show us our psychic wounds and to advise us along the path toward spiritual recovery. There was an almost palpable sense of hurt in that room. A lifetime of wounds opening up with a great sucking force. Was it the collective misery emanating from the patients upstairs? Was it the leftover vibe of previous aura seekers who had come to this room? Was it the nurse’s aide herself who needed to be redeemed?

Jane and I attempted to hold our skepticism in check; we did not want to be disrespectful. Sitting down in front of the Inneractive Aura Video Station one inserted one’s left hand into a homemade-looking device with a metal ring for each finger. This “aura sensor” sat upon a white lace doily that was itself sitting upon a velvet-upholstered rectangle of plywood. The jerry-rigged quality was out of sync with the generic design of the desktop computer but added a domesticating hint of Martha Stewart. A small camera on the computer monitor grabbed the image of the sitter. I took some snapshots while Jane was undergoing the treatment. When I sat down, the woman adjusted various options with the mouse, including a switch from the female to the male designation. The screen proclaimed, “See your Aura Colors-live!” Without fanfare, like a balloon rapidly filled by a powerful pump, my aura inflated around my image on the screen. An ellipse of transparent violet encased a Kelly green that snuggled closer to my body; a magenta halo hovered over my head. I thought of my Irish-ness and my affection for bougainvillea. On a side panel the needle to a kind of spiritual odometer fluctuated over a field of color, bending and shivering to the left. “If the needle is to the left, then you might live an unbalanced or unharmonious life,” the screen stated nonchalantly. “You might be in a stressed and tense State of MindBody.”

Well, that’s more or less a given in my experience. While I squirmed in the hard chair, bringing my face closer the monitor, I noticed that my aura did not move along with my body. My image seemed hermetically sealed within the stiff outer edges of my cosmic placenta, which glistened hard and impenetrable as a jewel. Feeling claustrophobic, I leapt from the chair like a panicky jack-in-the box; on the monitor my head popped out of my aura. My left hand was still attached to the machine, but with my free hand I managed to wave at myself, head and arm now extending beyond the limits of my egg/aura. I am a hatchling! Our cosmic commander chastised me “Sit down! You are outside your aura! The machine will not recognize you if you are not inside your aura.”

Thoughtographs

I don’t know whether it is coincidence or mysterious powers at play, but as we were organizing the panel “The Truth Is Out There: Photography and the Paranormal ,” Tom Beck, the director of Special Collections at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where I teach, called to inform me that he had just negotiated the donation of the archives of Dr. Jule Eisenbud. In 1966, Eisenbud published the book The World of Ted Serios: Thoughtographic Studies of an Extraordinary Mind. As described in the introduction, Ted Serios was a poorly educated, unemployed Chicago bellhop in his early forties who allegedly was able to project photographic images into Polaroid film by simply staring into the camera lens with intense concentration.

I had been aware of this body of work for some time and as an idle curiosity had occasionally trotted out some of the images for my students. In 1990, photographer Barbara Ess curated an exhibition of the thoughtographs of Ted Serios at the Marta Cervera Gallery in New York City. Recently I learned that the creator of the television show The X-Files, Chris Carter has acquired the rights to Eisenbud’s book so perhaps we are about to be fully immersed in a reexamination of or at least a revisitation to the world of Ted Serios. Although I had been primarily interested in the phenomenon of these psychic images, what really intrigued me while reading Eisenbud’s book and especially while watching the documentary footage in the archive was the power dynamic between Eisenbud as the cultured, rational, educated father figure and the inarticulate, alcoholic, infantilized, working-class idiot savant that is Ted Serios.

Eisenbud carefully controlled the parameters of the experiments yet allowed Serios to chain-smoke and chug quarts of Budweiser throughout the sessions, although he berated him if he became t00 drunk to produce. Sometimes Serios sat directly in front of the camera lens; during other sessions he sat across the room or even in a separate lead-lined room. Between his fingers and in from of the lens he often held what he called a “gizmo.” Usually this was a rolled-up piece of black paper or a tube from the Polaroid fixative, which accounts for the darkened edges of many of the images. I suppose it is possible that Serios somehow held a piece of film inside the gizmo, a fragment of a transparency of some kind, although Eisenbud and company made great assurances that no such trickery was involved. An unscientific guess would say that approximately one in ten of his attempts resulted in a somewhat recognizable image. Regardless of his proximity to the camera, with each attempt Serios worked himself into a frenzy of flailing arms, loud verbal countdowns, and vein-popping hyperventilation until he snapped his fingers at the point of telepathic ejaculation, impregnating the virgin film with his worldview. Invariably, following his psychic spasm, while Eisenbud peeled back the paper from the Polaroid film, Serios slumped back into his chair seemingly oblivious as to whether his sweaty efforts had produced photographic results.

The Taj Mahal, the Pentagon, the dome of the White House, a church in Munich, a historic monument, all rise up from the darkness of Serios’s unconscious. One might gamer that he was an architectural historian in a past life. Actually, many of (he images were suggested by what were called “target images”; photographs, generally of buildings, were placed in sealed manila envelopes near the camera while Serios attempted to divine the contents of the envelope and then transfer the image to the Polaroid. In many of these controlled situations, it is as if Serios could not be trusted to imagine his own pictures; he had to be instructed to parrot the suggestions of his superiors.

In other experiments Serios was prompted to image the past. Vintage cars, people walking down the street dressed in long passed fashions, and the facades of old hotels gave some evidence that Serios might travel in time. He even imagined a scene of what appeared to be a Neanderthal family unit dwelling in a cave. After the excitement subsided it was discovered that the image was a blurry reproduction of a diorama in Chicago’s Field Museum and perhaps was generated by a memory of having visited the museum as a child. These experiments in photographic time travel remind one of Chris Marker’s 1963 film La Jetee.  In fact an image of Serios reclining with eyes closed, bandage wrapped around his head and various electrodes for measuring brain activity, bears an uncanny resemblance to the tortures that the time-traveling character endures in La Jetee.

Serios’s behavior suggests a primal ritual of transformation. His role was that of an urban primitive (the unemployed, alcoholic bellhop from Chicago) tapping into some ancient, deeply buried power source to which the civilized no longer have access. With hysterical gestures he signifies a time-jumping or quasi-religious state of possession; he claims to bleed from the mouth and anus during particularly strenuous efforts making images. But for all the theatricality and photographic proof of his power, it doesn’t add up to much-the images are bland and generic, there is no poetry to them. Ted cannot or will not conjure the secret images of his childhood; he does not reveal his lustful desires or disclose how he imagines his own body.  We are not privy to his lonely and deserted visions. We are only allowed flat reproductions made “spooky” by blurriness and vignetting – the faux-aura of the otherworldly. As is so often the case, vagueness is confused with mystery His thoughtographs carry no message; they are empty signs of the paranormal. What is more tragic is that Serios does not appear to “know” anything; he seems to have received little wisdom from his gift. But perhaps we infer this as a result of a kind of anthropological conceit on the part of Dr. Eisenbud, who presents himself, ascot and all, as a godlike impresario, an eccentric intellectual, the “knowing” scientist, humanist, man of letters. He portrays Serios as his monkey on a leash. Serios is vaguely aware that his talent pleases the crowd but is only looking forward to the treat (quart of Budweiser) when the show is over. Serios plays the part of a buffoon, a vulgarian blessed with a minor telepathic power.

The archive includes the Polaroid images, documentary film footage, Eisenbud’s notes, and many certified affidavits that these psychic images were created under the watchful eyes of “scientists, photographers, and other intelligent observers” and that none could make a claim to tricks, deception, or fraud. Are these images authentic proof of Serios’s powers of mental projection? I cannot answer for certain. But what is certain are the obsessive procedures that were put in place to convince skeptics. Yet despite the apparent rigor of scientific method, the images themselves are what you might expect-diaphanous, blurry, vignetted, and incomplete. As with Victorian spirit photographs or UFO images, it seems that the visual proofs of paranormal activity must be conveyed in styles analogous to their tenuous accessibility. These other worlds supposedly captured on film, whether they are spiritual, telepathic, or alien, represent parallel universes that are simultaneously close by and far away-here but not here, visible only to sensitive clairvoyants or sensitive film. The photographs, then, straddle the fence between knowing and not knowing, between hard evidence and invisibility. The camera may sometimes act as a visual doorway to other worlds, but it is as if the lens were made of cheap plastic, offering only refractions, foggy figures, and ambiguity.

I desire otherworldly experiences, yet I want proof. Humans are programmed with these sometimes-contradictory impulses. By definition, having proof means that otherworldly experiences are brought into the concrete world of clarity and legibility. But when this happens they are in danger of losing their mystery and power to make us wonder. Much of human culture is a result of this ongoing struggle between our empirical demands and the need for an open-ended universe. We want our unshakable certainty and yet we hunger to be haunted. What better medium to use than photography in the attempt to resolve these contradictory impulses?

Photography-born of science and magic, alchemy and optics-produces images that are familiar and strange, anchored in time yet violently detached from its flow. It is no wonder that otherworldly travelers, from the spirit photographer William H. Mumler to Serios, employ photography to give currency to their powers. These images have their charm, but for me it is the humblest of snapshots, the most throwaway exposures, the least manipulated of images, the most generic portraits filling family albums that are infinitely more haunted than the most elaborate of photographic proofs of restless spirits, ectoplasms, faeries, abominable snowmen, and alien spacecraft. Photographs are inherently paradoxical; they are evidence and they are enigmatic: they tell us only about appearances, yet ask questions about our souls. Photographs mirror us, echo us, double us, and turn our very own lives into ghost stories.

Originally Published in Art Journal, Fall 2003