Spirit Photography Transition from Object to Subject

           If I offered you a grilled cheese sandwich for a thousand dollars you would most likely think I am insane. Now what if I told you that a 10-year-old grilled cheese sandwich sold for twenty eight thousand dollars. Oh, and a bite had already been taken out of it. My offer may start to make a little more sense now. This grilled cheese sandwich (shown on the left) is an example of spirit photography in its finest (and possibly oddest) form. Spirit photography is defined as photography whose primary goal is to capture images of spiritual entities.  Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations, by Tom Gunning, is an essay that discusses the origins of spirit photography and details the different ways it has been used and interpreted since its beginnings in about 1860. Gunning says it is used to further belief in spiritualists as they view it “not only as representations of something otherwise unseen, but supplying a sort of pictographic code between the visible world and the realms of the invisible” (Gunning 58). To put it bluntly, spirits communicate by a sort of picture language with those still living. These photographs are wonderful examples of objects becoming subject as something as simple as a grilled cheese sandwich transforms into the Virgin Mary herself, and therefore becomes a representation of the power of Christianity itself in the mind of spiritualists.  As Gunning puts it, “spirit photographs [are] the products of unknown spiritual forces […] communicating their existence to the living” (Gunning 65).

            It used to be thought that spirits could only be observed without a lens, but the beginning of the use of photography as the medium to show spiritual entities gave it a whole new power. Western culture has come to identify the conceivable solely with the visible, and so we have since entered into a “new realm of visuality, [in which] the photograph stands at its emblem” (Ibid 42). Since the photograph has become the guarantor of this new realm of visual certainty, anything present in photographs is considered to be guaranteed as fact.  Therefore, spiritual photographers are able to claim (almost always falsely) that what appears in their pictures was definitely there. Spiritualists, in turn, process what they see as complete truths and believe that the spirits must be communicating with them.

            Photography further perpetuates such blind belief in its assumption that the image created is out of the control of picture taker.  Unlike in painting or other art forms where the artists can choose the colors, size, and shape of everything in the artwork, a photograph is “created by a physical process over which human craft exert[s] no decisive role” (Ibid 42). It is assumed humans can choose what to photograph, but cannot create what they want to photograph. That part is “out of our control” (in reality this has proven to be far from true because of things like double exposures). This fact has a profound effect on the way the objects of spirit photographs are perceived. By showing something as definite fact while showing something so hard to believe, the spirit photograph “recorded the visual nature of material reality [while] it also seemed to dematerialize it, to transform it into a ghostly double” (Gunning 43). It is by this transformation that “photography becomes proof of idealism” (Gunning 43). By certifying the presence of this face on the grilled cheese and giving such an object “proof of existence”, photography actually exalts the object beyond its own existence. 

            This seal of certification photography provides to such spiritual entities then acts to perpetuate blind faith and distract people of how ridiculous the subject of the photographs may actually be.  By not having to doubt whether the objects are real, spiritualists are left only to wonder, “about what supernatural forces actually produced these images” (Ibid 51). In the case of the sandwich, people wonder what the Virgin Mary may be trying to communicate, or maybe even which exact spirit is trying to prove its existence.  Instead, the much more obvious question – which the power of photography blinds us to - is why someone so grand and powerful as the Virgin Mary would use a sandwich as the medium to make her all mighty return. One would imagine a woman capable of producing a baby without having sex would at least assemble an ice sculpture or move a mountain range in the form of her face to remind spiritualists of her existence.  In fact, how do we even know it is the Virgin Mary? It could just as easily be Peter Frampton.

            Lastly, it is hard to determine whether or not this grilled cheese was intentionally made to appear like the Virgin Mary.  Gunning explains that, “most often spirit photographers claimed they did not know how their photographs happened” (Ibid 48).  However, several photographs have been proven to be the result of double exposures and other such human manipulations.  People are able to build entire castles out of just sand – it does not seem out of the realm of possibility that we can create burn marks on a sandwich in the shape of a female face. In fact, here are a bunch of pieces of toast with Hitler’s face on them! He must really be trying to make a point.