This is a very interesting book about William Mumler, a "spirit photographer". As the title of the book suggests, he was fraudulently capturing phantom images in photographs of living people. He became a sensation in Boston and NYC. Apparently his first "spirit photograph" was produced accidentally. His wife, and the Spiritualist movement, saw these photographs as proof of their beliefs. Many famous people, including Mary Todd Lincoln, were photographed in his studio, surrounded by images that they identified as dearly departed loved ones. Eventually, he was arrested for fraud. Unfortunately, there is no clear explanation of how Mumler used his "Process" to produce phantom images. This book is a reminder that through technology, we can be fooled into seeing what we want to believe. ( )

A readable history that nonetheless illustrates the peril in trying to hook a set of broad historical narrative around a single moment or individual. In this case, Peter Manseau tries to use the mid-nineteenth-century trial of William Mumler, the "spirit photographer" who claimed to have captured the ghosts of Abraham Lincoln and others on photographic plates, to tell the story of the invention of photography and photographic fraud, the rise of Spiritualism, public grief and memorialisation in response to the U.S. Civil War, bigger questions of hope and belief, and more. This is a lot, and neither the rather thin historical source base we've got about Mumler nor Manseau's organisational choices enable The Apparitionists to be a wholly satisfying read. Still, it's a brisk read with some good "people bought that?" moments—and you know they've got to be good to get me to do a doubletake in 2021, the year when credulous gullibility and wilful ignorance seems almost to be in fashion. ( )

Lost interest huh ( )

[b: The Apparitionists|30971741|The Apparitionists A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost|Peter Manseau|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1501811385s/30971741.jpg|51589481] is more than simply a book about spirit photography or the Spiritualism movement in America. Rather, it is a history of Civil War era America and the invention of photography itself - how it remolded the fabric of America and the way in which we interacted with death and the dead, and the question of belief itself. How could belief be put on trial? How might one contend with someone both capitalizing off of grief and offering a balm to those in mourning? It's a complicated question.

The story of Spirit Photography, or at least that that Mumler practiced, is a story that includes figures as disparate as Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, the then Mayor of New York City, P.T. Barnum, Mathew Brady, and Samuel Morse. It pulled people together and tore them apart, and revolutionized the process of fact-checking and what proof people demanded in order to believe stories told. It is the chief irony of ironies that the very man who may have been practicing photographic fraud was able to place upon the public a new burden of proof by manufacturing the very process that allowed newspapers to chiefly print photographs.

This was a fascinating book, although at times disorganized. It beautifully brought to life late 1800s society and how complex their beliefs were and how they grew over time. I devoured this book, and fully suspect many who pick it up will do the same.

Give it a try, see what you believe by the end. ( )

This turned out to be rather different from what I expected, but I found it interesting. The subtitle, “A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost,” suggests that the book is about William Mumler and his spirit photography, and that is, indeed, the spine that runs through the book and holds it together. The bulk of Manseau's work, though, is an exploration of the early days of American photography and its revolutionary impact on the culture. The Civil War, with its legacy of loss and grief on a vast scale, created an ideal market for a man offering to reveal a last glimpse of lost family members or friends, and the wonder of the recently invented telegraph machine and other advances in the use of electricity made the capture of other “invisible energies” seem more plausible.

The organization of the book feels a little random, but each topic visited is fun, and does help provide a context in which Mumler's spirit photographs, clearly fake as they appear now, might seem credible to the many people who found comfort in the photos purporting to show the spirits of dead loved ones. I found the sections on Alexander Gardner (who took many of the photos credited to Mathew Brady, a fellow whose marketing skills seem to have equaled his gifts as a photographer) and P.T. Barnum particularly enjoyable.

The story of Mumler himself was a little disappointing, in large part because Manseau can't tell us how he actually made the photographs, and there are no “secret” letters to his wife or friends in which he crows triumphantly about his fraud or complains, martyr-like, about the skepticism of his critics. No personal insights about him at all, really. We get the facts of his careers – as an engraver, an inventor of a dyspepsia remedy, a photographer, a spirit photographer, and, later in life, as inventor of a photographic process for printing photos in newspaper – but never much sense of the man himself. I assume this is due to a lack of information, as Manseau successfully conveys the personalities of other figures, but his central character remains rather an enigma.

I listened to the audio version of this, so I missed out on the illustrations, but Wikipedia offers a fine selection of Mumler's spirit photographs. Jefferson Mays was the reader on the recording, and it took me a while to get used to his accent, which struck me as “affected,” but eventually I did, and aside from that he did a fine job. ( )