The Apparitionists

by Peter Manseau

  “It is certainly very strange, and the mystery baffles all unraveling,” it was reported in Wisconsin. “Eminent photographers have explored Mumler’s gallery and laboratory, watched his way of producing pictures from beginning to end, and have declared that the result is unexplainable.”

  With the telegraph’s help, papers around the country became an extension of the courtroom. The testimonies of Samuel Fanshaw and Lutheria Reeves were recounted in detail in Cleveland, while William Slee, wishing to say more than he had been given opportunity on the witness stand, wrote a letter to the New York Tribune that was picked up and reprinted far and wide. “I will pay $100 to any expert who will come to my rooms, and, under the same circumstances that Mr. Mumler’s pictures were produced there, do the same by natural means without detection. If he succeeds, and can give a satisfactory explanation of the matter, I will promptly acknowledge the fact to the world, and thank him for the solution of a mystery beyond my comprehension.”

  Mumler’s name soon became known in the press in England, France, Australia, and Spain, where tales of the photographer’s “figura vaporosa” were treated far more credulously than closer to home.

  IN THE COURTROOM ITSELF, ghostly figures began to materialize from photography’s past.

  By the time he appeared before Judge Dowling’s bench, Jeremiah Gurney was no longer the commanding figure he once had been. Through the 1850s, he had been the rival of Mathew Brady for the mantle of preeminent photographer in New York. Not only had he lost that fight by the end of the following decade, but the loss had apparently so unmoored him that he broke ranks with the city’s photographic elite to serve as a witness called by Mumler’s defense.

  With Gurney’s own studio at 707 Broadway, it was but a short walk downtown to visit Mumler, to watch the spirit photographer at work, which he did at the request of a wealthy Spiritualist shortly before the trial began. “I have been a photographer for twenty-eight years,” Gurney testified. “I have witnessed Mumler’s process, and although I went prepared to scrutinize everything, I could find nothing which savoured of fraud or trickery.”

  Gurney had been brought in as an expert on photographic technique; he did not mention that he had also lately acquired expertise as a photographer of death. He didn’t need to say a word about it, however. A picture he had taken of a corpse four years earlier was among the most sought after in the country, even though no one had ever seen it.

  As a lifelong New Yorker, Gurney had not had occasion during the war to bring his camera to the battlefield. Unlike Brady and Gardner, he had no studio in Washington that might have put him closer to the action. He was also a fifty-year-old survivor of mercury poisoning by the time other, younger photographers began rolling their wheeled developing labs to the front. Yet he had of course not failed to notice the acclaim that views of the hostilities had brought his rivals. And so when the war came home, he was ready.

  His big moment arrived shortly after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865. The president’s death had sent photographers scrambling for images that might be used to tell the story, and Gurney had an idea that was sure to set his studio apart.

  But he faced stiff competition. In the race to record events related to a national tragedy, and to reap the monetary rewards such pictures were sure to yield, Alexander Gardner’s connections in the capital had given him a clear advantage.

  The Scotsman was the first on the scene at Ford’s Theatre to photograph the building in which John Wilkes Booth shot the president. With its windows draped in black mourning cloth and armed sentries posted before the door, the theater’s façade as captured by Gardner was itself a promising memorial image, but it was not nearly so moving as the picture he made inside: the empty theater box where the night’s guests of honor had sat enjoying a performance of Our American Cousin when the assassin put his pistol to the back of Lincoln’s head.

  Soon after, Gardner was asked to copy images of Booth for the War Department’s Wanted poster. Then, following the shooter’s death at the hands of a sergeant from the 16th New York Cavalry, he was the lone photographer allowed to enter the autopsy room. While Gardner now had privileged access to such singular scenes, his former employer Brady had to content himself with making photographs of Lincoln’s funeral procession, first in Washington and then in New York. Each was a grand spectacle of grief, but neither offered the kind of picture Brady had come to strive for: the isolated instant somehow reflecting the nation as a whole. The only possible image that might do so was perhaps of Lincoln himself, but the president’s lifeless body was kept under such close guard that not even Gardner had been able to secure a picture.

  Gurney found his opportunity on April 24, nine days after the president’s death. Lincoln’s body was scheduled to lie in state in the rotunda of New York City Hall, where it would be seen by more than a hundred thousand people before it continued on to Albany and ultimately to Illinois for burial.

  The face seen by so many that day was nothing like the ambitious, youthful man depicted by Mathew Brady in 1860, or even the gaunt, mournful one recorded by Gardner in 1862. “The color is leaden, almost brown,” the New York Times reported on Lincoln’s posthumous appearance. “The forehead recedes sharp and is clearly marked; the eyes deep sunk and close held upon the socket. The cheek bones, always high, are unusually prominent; the cheeks hollowed and deep pitted; the unnaturally thin lips shut tight and firm as if glued together; and the small chin covered with a slight beard, seemed pointed and sharp.”

  To photograph such a face—the well-known features of Abraham Lincoln turned as utterly unrecognizable as parts of the nation had become—would be to display the ultimate cost of the war as no other photographer had managed. And it was Jeremiah Gurney alone who was there to take the picture.

  Given special permission to enter the rotunda before the doors were opened to the public, Gurney arranged his camera twenty feet above the body and forty feet away. Far from a close-up, the only image he could make from this distance would show the somber pageantry of the president lying in a darkened hall. Busts of Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster peered down on the scene. On the floor, arrangements of scarlet azaleas, nasturtiums, japonicas, and orange blossoms formed a shield and a cross made entirely of flowers. At the foot of Lincoln’s casket stood General Edward D. Townsend; at the head, Admiral Charles H. Davis, both men with their arms crossed as if uncertain they had made the right decision to allow a photographer to disturb this sacred moment.

  Gurney worked for half an hour. He then packed up his camera and returned to 707 Broadway with a photographic prize like no other.

  Word of this coup spread quickly. Late in the evening of the next day, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton sent an angry telegram.

  WAR DEPARTMENT

  Washington City

  April 25, 1865—11.40 p.m.

  Brigadier-General Townsend:

  I see by the New York papers this evening that a photograph of the corpse of President Lincoln was allowed to be taken yesterday in New York. I cannot sufficiently express my surprise and disapproval of such an act while the body was in your charge. You will report what officers of the funeral escort were or ought to have been on duty at the time this was done, and immediately relieve them and order them to Washington. You will also direct the provost-marshal to go to the photographer, seize and destroy the plates and any pictures or engravings that may have been made, and consider yourself responsible if the offense is repeated.

  EDWIN M. STANTON

  Secretary of War

  Townsend took full responsibility. “The photograph was taken while I was present, Admiral Davis being the officer immediately in charge, but it would have been my part to stop the proceedings,” he wrote in response. “I regret your disapproval, but it did not strike me as objectionable under the circumstances as it was done.”

  Despite Gurney’s protests, 707 Broadway was raided by army officers, who seized the negatives and prints for destruction. Their of
ficial justification was that Gurney had not sought approval from those with authority to grant it, and that circulating such pictures might cause distress to Mrs. Lincoln. Alternate theories immediately filled the press. “The reason assigned for this action is, that the pictures were surreptitiously obtained, no permission having been given by the War Department,” the New York Express noted. “No other photographers obtained pictures, and it is alleged that the seizure was brought about by disappointed rivals.”

  There is no evidence that either Gardner, who had recently come into Stanton’s favor, or Brady, who had known Stanton for years, personally prevailed upon the secretary of war to suppress Gurney’s images of Lincoln. Yet for two men then engaged in a contest to be remembered as the photographer who most fully documented the war, it would not do to have another man record one of the most significant images of the era.

  For Brady especially, exerting such pressure would not have been out of the question. Considering the lengths to which he would go to remind Gurney who now ruled their profession, doing so would have been in keeping with his approach to business.

  Two years later, in a last-gasp effort to reestablish his reputation, Gurney had secured for himself what he hoped would be another game-changing photograph. A quarter century after his first visit to America, Charles Dickens announced he would make a grand return to New York and Boston. On his previous visit, he had made headlines by touring the prison where Brady had his first photographic assignment, and his fame had only grown. His fans waited hours in line for tickets to every U.S. reading he had scheduled. Sensing an opportunity, Gurney had contracted with Dickens’s agent, George Dolby, for the exclusive right to take and sell pictures of the celebrated author. As the Brooklyn Eagle reported, this did not go as planned:

  DICKENS, GURNEY, AND BRADY

  A few days since, the Gurneys announced with a grand flourish of trumpets a series of superb pictures of the lion of the day, accompanying the same with a card from the doughty Dolby, which said that Dickens would sit at no other establishment. Of course everybody who wanted a picture rushed to Gurney’s to get it. What was the astonishment of the trade and the public, when the bold Brady announced with another flourish of trumpets that he too had secured superb pictures of Dickens. This made Gurney mad, Dolby faint, and Dickens irate.

  Learning that Dickens’s agent had struck a deal with Gurney, Brady had simply manipulated an older photograph to make it look new. He had painted in a different shirt, smoothed the author’s unruly hair, and generally given a years-old image a gloss that made it seem fresh from the camera. Gurney threatened legal action, but feared the damage could not be undone. “In justification of our mercantile honor,” he wrote in an open letter, “which has been assailed by the publication of editorial articles in different Metropolitan journals, which, if true would tend to place us before the public as impostors, we beg to assert thus publicly, that Mr. Charles Dickens has not, and will not sit to any other Photographers but ourselves in the United States: that any pictures of Mr. Dickens, either exposed to view or offered for sale, and not having our imprint are COPIES of pictures taken in Europe, and that any attempt to advertise them, either by payment or editorial notice, as originals, is a fraud and imposition on the public.”

  Though he was careful to name no names in his complaint, anyone keeping track of the growing animosity between the city’s two best-known photographers would surely have grasped his implication: Mathew Brady was as phony as any other camera-wielding con man trying to pass off an image as something it was not.

  THE ALLEGATIONS MADE against Brady never made it to a courtroom, but if they had, Gurney surely would have decried the use of mechanical and chemical means to alter a photograph for the purpose of fooling the public. On the whole, those who purchased images from the many photographers now hawking their services along Broadway remained unsophisticated when it came to viewing them. Given the claims of perfectly rendered detail that had attended the art since the days of Daguerre and Morse, the notion that photographs were not objective reflections of reality was difficult for many to grasp. Had he been able to face Brady in court, Gurney likely would have tried to make all of this clear.

  His testimony in the Mumler affair had the opposite effect. Though he was particularly attuned to the ways in which the photographic process could be used to present fiction as if it were fact, he had found nothing amiss when he shadowed the spirit photographer in his labors. “It was the usual process of preparing a plate for taking a photograph,” Gurney said. “The only thing out of the usual routine being the fact that the operator kept his hand on the camera. I have no belief as to the spiritual emanation of these photographs; on the contrary, I believe, although I cannot assert positively, that they are produced by purely natural means.”

  To determine just what these natural means might be, the prosecution called a parade of photographers to the stand to suggest possible methods Mumler might have used. Representing the American Photographic Society, two veteran practitioners of the art, Oscar Mason and Charles Hull, testified that they themselves could produce ghostly images through means far from otherworldly.

  Mason, the secretary of the Photographic Section of the American Institute at the Cooper Union, displayed an example depicting a female apparition and described his method. “The effect was produced,” he said, “by taking the negative of a lady and making a positive of it. This was subsequently used in making a spirit picture on a photograph. It is very easy to deceive almost anyone.”

  Hull, a soap manufacturer by trade who had made photography his avocation for eleven years, explaining that he had written many scientific articles on the subject, offered several possible explanations. For example, he said, “a veiled figure seated behind the sitter for an instant might produce the same effect.”

  Despite his assertion that he would have no more to do with the ghoul or his art, Charles Boyle, Mumler’s most tireless investigator in Boston, also returned to speak out against him. Between them, the prosecution’s photographic experts proposed seven ways that spirit photographs might be made:

  The photographer might take an image on one glass plate, then keep it hidden in his camera to produce a secondary image on a new plate when it is exposed.

  The photographer might direct an accomplice dressed in white to pose for an instant behind the sitter, obscuring himself before being detected.

  The photographer might insert a translucent miniature image of a spirit inside the camera directly behind the lens. When light passed through the aperture, the miniature image would sufficiently distort the light to leave a “ghost” on the exposure.

  After the photograph has been taken, while the glass plate is still sensitive, the photographer could place a spirit image behind it while re-exposing it to light.

  The photographer might impose a blurred image on the slide while the plate is in the silver nitrate bath by means of a secret light.

  The photographer might print the spirit image onto paper, and then reuse that paper to print a new image of the sitter on top of it.

  A glass plate used to take the image of one person may simply be prepared and used again without sufficiently washing off the pre-existing image.

  To all of these explanations, Mumler’s defense team listened patiently. Attorney Townsend then calmly pointed out that they never argued that spirit photographs could not be produced by such means. The fact remained, however, that as Jeremiah Gurney’s testimony indicated, the prosecution had not proven that Mumler had used any of them.

  As the New York Tribune summed up the trial’s proceedings: “The actual developments of the case, thus far, may be briefly stated. It is shown that the so-called spirit photographs can be produced by ordinary photographic appliances, and that this may be accomplished by experts so dexterously as to defy detection. It is shown that several such experts have produced such pictures. It is shown that Mumler did produce some, years ago, which were almost if not quite admitted by the parties concerned t
o be deceptions. But it is not shown that the pictures in question are not genuine portraits of spirits.”

  The prosecution was not done, however. As if in personal rebuke to Gurney both for siding with Mumler and for making images of Lincoln’s corpse years before, prosecutor Elbridge Gerry next called the photographer Abraham Bogardus to the stand.

  Bogardus had operated a studio on Broadway as long as Gurney himself, and like the other experts testified that he had been able to produce a photograph nearly identical to those now at the center of the controversy. Entered into evidence, Bogardus’s picture showed none other than the famous showman P. T. Barnum with a faint image of the late president floating above his head. The incongruous combination, with its implication that the spirit of the man whose memory was already held sacred would visit a known huckster like Barnum, filled the courtroom with raucous laughter, which Judge Dowling did his best to quell.