The State of Spirit Photography in the 21st Century

Spirit photography, the impassioned practice of capturing the paranormal in a prison of film, gained mayor prominence in the 19^th century, when the streets were black and white, and the lamps sputtered and smoked. Finding the right newspaper on a cold Brooklyn pavement would net you galleries of obscure pictures—a fading hand suspended from the ceiling, a moon-washed, anthropomorphic afterimage at the bottom of the stairs, the misty but powerful slivers of what once was a human face. And in this, joy reverberated throughout the spirit realm, lost souls finally found, acknowledged by the true, physical cognition that they left behind long ago, one they could now study under the spotlight of technology. 

But as the planet turned, the science of photography gained new senses and fresh limbs. Colors spilled, blurs sharpened, shadows brightened. Prisons of film shifted to prisons of light and signals, a format that struggled to bind the immaterial. Not anymore could you find the portraits of nimble spirits in any public street; their spaces were replaced by prettier pictures, those of living families, fine wardrobes, and glowing gardens.  

The spirit realm tried its best to adapt. Its ghosts stretched and twisted themselves into foreign shapes, attempting to slot themselves into the empty spaces of those pictures. They lay on the hands holding down the Eiffel Tower, they crawled across the face of security cameras as a cicada, they made the TVs flicker and hiss. It would occasionally work; the humans would notice, accept their presence, and set out to learn, but the same people would soon turn and take another photograph, now one depicting the beauty they had been searching for, one lacking any ghosts.  

That’s when the spirit realm had to come to a terrifying conclusion: Spirit photography, in place of an inquisitive and deliberate art, was a practice born out of inconvenience and a lack of options. Humans never intended to hunt for spirits in their infant art, but instead only what they perceived as real. Photography didn’t lose its ability to see specters—it outgrew them. In the newborn capacities of their recording technology, humans could capture a world far more real than the one around the veil, one where the visuals were crisp, tangible, and clear. The once prominent presence of spirits was simply a required step towards that scientific world, a step important only as a step, held back by its liminal purpose, with optional memories that found few minds to call home. 

The ghosts sank into the discreet shadows of the house, ignored even in visual collisions with the ones that pictured them the most. Shattered as it was, the spirit realm could understand—why keep the old when innovation offers so much? What reason would they have to lag on society’s progress? Even in death, the soul was temporary in the lives of the people. There will always come a moment in every potential world, each one with its own unique web of possibilities, when spirits become obsolete.  

And so, the ghosts stood and contemplated the quiet state of their life in the 21^st century as the veil closed as a pale, glassy curtain. They left the sets and sceneries, abandoned the lenses’ field of view. Nobody would ever find them again unless they tried, truly tried, to reach them from the living’s new world, the one they had always wished for, the one that faultlessly fits them like a puzzle piece or a slipper, the one that offers so much more than the spirits ever could. Why would such blessed people ever go back? Why would they seek the paranormal, the supernatural, when the natural and normal now embraces them? Why would they want to keep the dead alive?