Anthony Enns

Anthony Enns is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Iowa. His work has appeared in such journals as Culture, Theory & Critique, Science Fiction Studies, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Popular Culture Review, Studies in Popular Culture, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Currents in Electronic Literacy, and in the anthology Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (Pluto P, 2004). He is also co-editor of the anthology Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability (UP of America, 2001).

The Return of the Dead. Photography, Memory, and Mourning

The invention of photography promised to immortalize the dead, as can be seen in memorial and spirit photographs, two widespread practices in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Tom Gunning argues that the photographing of ghosts represents photography's uncanny ability to create "a parallel world of phantasmatic doubles alongside the concrete world of the senses," while critics like André Bazin suggest that photography is actually an extension of earlier practices of mummification and embalming. Roland Barthes similarly argues that every photograph represents "the return of the dead," and Corey Creekmur claims that photography's ability to preserve a tangible connection to the dead might even prolong or inhibit mourning by providing the constant illusion of presence. This essay will expand on this work by reexamining the phenomenon of spirit photography and its relation to memory and mourning. I will argue not only that these photographs served to prolong mourning by preserving a living connection to the dead, but also that they represent a crisis in perception that occurred in the nineteenth century. While the photographic apparatus seemed to function as a prosthetic technology that simulated the function of the eye, spirit photography also revealed the potential limitations of the eye and the degree to which viewing photographs involved a highly creative and imaginative investment. The scandals and trials that resulted from these images also illustrate a public debate about the reliability of photographs and the very nature of vision and memory. Instead of providing viewers with a tangible link to the past, these photographs were incorporated into a more complex psychic process of constructing personal connections between past and present, thus bridging reality and fantasy, the living and the dead.

held at: Poietic Spaces. Communicating Landscapes of Imagination. May 6-8, 2004