The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer by Louis Kaplan

Louis Kaplan has been awarded a Standard Research Grant as well as both Insight and Insight Development Grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He has collaborated with the artist Melissa Shiff on research-creation projects incorporating new media including the highly acclaimed augmented reality exploration, Mapping Ararat, and, more recently, the virtual reality project, The Imaginary Jewish Homelands of I.N. He holds cross-appointments or affiliations with the Cinema Studies Institute, the Centre for Jewish Studies, the Centre for the Study of the United States, and the Knowledge Media Design Institute. Kaplan has published eleven books, three exhibition catalogues, and over eighty scholarly essays and articles. His wide-ranging research interests include 20th and 21st century European and North American art and visual culture film and media culture deconstruction contemporary Jewish art and visual culture humour studies and new media art practices (especially augmented reality). Professor Kaplan is recognized internationally for his innovative historical and theoretical contributions to the field of photography studies in such areas as spirit photography, photography and community, photographic humour, the New Vision, and photography theory.

FADIS (Federated Academic Digital Imaging System).

Mississauga & Scarborough Campus Positions.

Department of Arts, Culture and Media (Scarborough).

Department of Visual Studies (Mississauga).

The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer is the definitive resource for this unique and fascinating moment in American history and provides insights into today’s ghosts in the machine.

Mumler’s case was an early example of investigative journalism intersecting with a criminal trial that, at its essence, set science against religion. Kaplan also contributes two extended essays, which offer a historical perspective of the Mumler phenomena and delve into the sociocultural and theoretical issues surrounding this vivid ghost story. Barnum’s famous indictment of Mumler in Humbugs of the World. In The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer, Louis Kaplan brings together, for the first time, Mumler’s haunting images, his revealing memoir, and rich primary sources, including newspaper articles and P. Mumler’s insistence that his work brought back the dead led to a sensational trial in 1869 that was the talk of the nation. Skeptics, however, called it a fraudulent trick on the gullible, taking advantage of the grieving at a time of suffering and loss. The practice came to be known as spirit photography, and some believed Mumler was channeling the dead. Faint images of the dearly departed lurked in the background with the living, like his well-known photo of the recently assassinated Abraham Lincoln comforting Mary Todd.

In the 1860s, William Mumler photographed ghosts-or so he claimed.

The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer by Louis Kaplan