Intro

A friend loaned me “Safelight” because it’s about photography and death—two of my hobbies. She said it made her depressed. And it is a depressing book, in the same way “Tuesdays With Morrie” (Mitch Albom) is a depressing book. Drawing from his experience as a paramedic in Harlem, the author takes us on a gritty ride through the squalid backstreets of NYC circa 1990. Through his main character Frank, a paramedic, Mr. Burke relates life through ambulance calls with gruesome clarity and realism. Frank’s job is the vehicle for the story.

What is Safelight about?

The word safelight refers literally to the reddish light used in photographic darkrooms. Metaphorically it has other meanings in the book. Written in the first person, Safelight is a riveting account of a two-year portion of the main character’s life. Frank, the paramedic, is also an amateur photographer who likes to photograph dead, injured, and decrepit people. It appears to be a sick habit his coworkers tolerate, maybe even admire. We never really find out why he does it (to which I can relate, as a photographer), only that it helps him cope in some real way with his life and the death of his father. Frank enters a relationship with a terminally ill woman, a professional fencer. Life happens quickly in this relatively short book.

What is Safelight about?

The characters in Safelight are tough, as one would envision New Yorkers to be. Tough ‘til the end. Though none of them are developed to any great extent, we learn who they are and how they are wired effectively enough to hold the story together. They are thoroughly believable from my perspective: I’m a photographer, I live in a big city, I work at a hospital, and I have a (possibly) less-than-wholesome interest in death.

Harlem, 1990

Set in the tenement neighborhoods of New York City in 1990, the book is part love story, part self-discovery. Frank gets into various forms of trouble, or rather, puts him into situations that seem unwise from an objective point of view. But really, we sometimes do things that are inexplicable, not only to the watching world, but to our own selves. Some of the things the characters do also seem inexplicable; though we know they can and do happen.

Reading this book is another one of those inexplicable things. It’s almost like you know there will be a bad outcome, but you keep reading, expecting some life-affirming philosophy at the end. In this regard, the book does not disappoint. I found it difficult to put down, perhaps because it appealed to me on so many levels. Paramedics would find the story technically accurate. Photographers will relate to Frank, especially if they’ve labored to find direction, reason, and an outlet for their work. No different, really, than the average person looking for and possibly finding direction. After reading Safelight, we’re tempted to look back on our own lives and consider that specific experiences may not have been mere distractions in our path, but rather guideposts. Could such an epiphany change the way we view future events?

The Writing Style

Safelight is Burke’s first novel. The writing is almost in journal, or diary form. Maybe what you’d expect in a paramedic’s notebook. It’s concise, almost terse writing style is engaging in that you know this chapter will not contain fluff. You expect the other shoe to drop at any time.

Summarizing Safelight

It seems to me the goal of the book is to make us think about why we do what we do. We see from chronologic narratives how lives are shaped by discreet events–birth, childhood, friendships, marriage, divorce, death. But we also see that only the first event, birth, is beyond our control. Whatever else happens to us is usually of our choosing. Things don’t happen to us so much as we choose our directions.

A book like this can make you feel a lot of things—like you are afraid to die, like you should appreciate the beauty in the world, like starting a new romance, be accepting of death. In the liner notes, Safelight is described as a “love story not for the faint of heart.” Sounds trite, but for me it meant that a love story doesn’t necessarily mean the couple will live happily ever after. Its optimism stems from the fact that life really only has one end. When we find ourselves at an impasse, stalled, or traumatized, we can think of how Helen Keller said that when one door closes, another opens.

I’d never have known of the existence of this little treasure if not for Ross Mitchell, Executive Director of Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. During an interview with Ross, he mentioned that portions of the book will be re-enacted on the cemetery grounds during the Philadelphia Fringe Festival on September 9, 2006.

About Edgar Lee Masters

The author of this poetic odyssey, Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1950), was an enormously prolific American writer and poet. He is known mainly for Spoon River, his most popular work. Ezra Pound said “at last, America has discovered a poet” in reference to Masters. He author was dubbed “the natural child of Walt Whitman” by one critic, as his poetic style is similar to Whitman’s. (Whitman, by the way, is buried across the river from Philadelphia, at Harleigh Cemetery in Camden, NJ).

Structure of Spoon River

The book is essentially a collection of poems written by Masters, epigrams which detail the lives of the many residents of a fictitious midwestern town in the late 1800s. Though more about the human condition, the book is written with the town as a backdrop to 245 single-page monologues by the deceased – as if they wrote their own epitaphs. The poetry is free verse, sometimes beautiful, always poignant in its relation to the balance of life and death. Spoon River is deceptively light reading, but is not to be taken lightly.

After Death, Life Lamented

The epitaphs chronicle the aspirations and interactions, the defeats, the loves, lives, and deaths of these individuals. Most lament the fact that they were not appreciated, though a few are satisfied with their lives. Its timeless take-home message is that even in small-town America, nothing is ever as it seems.

Spoon River is an easy read, as most people’s lives are summed up in a page of poetry. It’s engaging because there are so many different personalities from so many walks of life. Whether it be the successful shopkeeper, the adulterer, unwed mother, or the poor but honest lawyer (Masters himself was a lawyer, serving with the famous Clarence Darrow’s law firm in the early 1900s), the reader is almost certain to relate to one.

Memorials to a Townspeople, Light on the Genealogy

Now townspeople of a different town, the inhabitants admit things about their lives that are a bit shocking, even to the contemporary reader. The book was highly controversial when it was first published (1915), causing quite a stir among political, literary, and religious conservatives. The experiences are loosely based on the small town in which Masters was born, one in which a bank collapse caused great turmoil. The book more than illustrates the trials and tribulations of people in rural America – it mirrors society in general and comments on all of our hypocritical behaviors. Families are loosely followed for two generations, but the book reads as though this entire fictional community passed on at the same time.

Life After Death (The Afterlife as a State of Melancholy)

The book provides interesting social commentary, sometimes amusing, usually melancholy. It reminds us of how one’s own epitaph can be so at odds with the printed obituary or verse carved onto a headstone, a diptych if there ever was! To paraphrase Masters, our true epitaphs are more lasting than stone. A great read for anyone interested in death and the afterlife.

Fringe Festival Performance – The Late Laureates of Laurel Hill (Cemetery)

Spoon River has been adapted to the stage in the past, even with musical scores added. As part of the 2006 Philly Fringe Live Arts Festival, a twilight reading of Spoon River will take place in Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery. See the Fringe Festival website for details.

In Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach gave a humorous summary of what happens to our bodies when we die. Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife looks beyond the physical for proof that a part of us survives death.
Roach approaches the material as a skeptic who wants to believe but needs the proof. As she says in the opening pages

Simply put, this is a book for people who would like very much to believe in a soul and in an afterlife for it to hang around in, but who have trouble accepting these things on faith.

In Spook, Roach isn’t afraid to tackle even the most bizarre phenomenon. She admits to knowing next to nothing about her subjects when she first starts, so anything is fair game – from traveling to India to see claims of reincarnation first hand to taking a seminar to learn to become a psychic, from talking with scientists studying near-death experiences to digging up props that were once spewed as ectoplasm by spiritualists.

No detail seems too small for Roach. When looking for the soul, for instance, she goes in search of the legendary luz of Jewish Midrash – a single indestructible bone in the spine from which a person is reconstructed after death; talks of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek’s observations of sperm under the microscope, which led to the erroneous notion of preformationism – the idea that tiny embryo live in the heads of sperm; and discusses Duncan Macdougall’s attempts to weigh the body at the time of death and who famously declared that the soul weighs 21 grams.

Roach writes with a clever, witty style reminiscent to Stiff. She takes a hands on approach, immersing herself in the material, talking with prominent scientists who are studying this phenomenon, and even venturing out into the fringes of paranormal studies to see what other explanations are available.

Unfortunately, that’s also the book’s downfall. Roach seems more concerned with writing witty, entertaining prose than separating the legitimate scientific studies from the pseudoscience. She’d prefer to throw it all out there and let the reader piece together the sound evidence rather than stick with the premise she started – to see what proof science has found for an afterlife.

Surprisingly, Roach also missed what I think is one of the strongest long-term studies out there supporting reincarnation. Ian Stevenson started collecting a database of over 2500 children who claim to remember past lives at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Jim Tucker has been continuing his research. Some of the stories these kids tell are incredible – from children who pick up the mannerisms and even scars and injuries from their previous personalities to those that remember specific experiences and personal details that would be virtually impossible for a child to know. Check out Tucker’s fascinating Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children’s Memories of Previous Lives for more information.

Spook is an incredibly entertaining read and difficult to put down but if you’re looking for concrete proof that there’s an afterlife, you won’t find it here. What you’ll get are lots of interesting trivia, entertaining stories, and bits and pieces of possible evidence.

With a title like that, what aging rock music fan could resist? With a color photo of Jim Morrison’s grave on the cover and one of Strawberry Fields on the back, what’s not to like? Actually, I’m up a stump as to which demographic such books appeal (another example is Scott Stanton’s The Tombstone Tourist: Musicians). I never buy them – my brother gives them to me as gifts. I have a mild curiosity about them, mainly because I listen to music and I frequent cemeteries. But since I’m not much into celebrity worship, I can’t imagine ever buying one.
The title is a bit of a misnomer – “rock’s legends” apparently include rappers, country stars, punkers, R&B greats, and MOR crooners. While they may be legends in their own right, they’re not really considered rockers.

The book has relevance as social commentary, or rather documentation. In the words of the author:

“…I wanted to explore the forces that draw us to these graves, as well as tell the tales about the musicians, their last moments, and their final resting places…”

And this he does quite succinctly – generally a page of his text accompanies a few photographs by Maddy Miller for each of the dearly departed. In total, hundreds of photos (both color and B&W) effectively document the hundred deceased stars and their gravesites.

The book is engaging in a voyeuristic sort of way. Maybe you’ve wondered about the final resting place of your hero. Or perhaps you flip through the book only to find that some notable is buried (figuratively) in your own backyard! Bessie Smith’s remains lie a mile from my house – beneath a headstone that was donated by Janis Joplin.

Chances are, though, you’re not going to buy an entire book because there’s a picture of your hero’s gravesite in it. You already know his or her story, so you’re not going to learn much of anything new here. The content of the book is too broad to appeal in its entirety to most people. Even if you were a curious new Led Zeppelin fan wondering how Bonzo met his demise, you probably wouldn’t be interested in reading about Harry Chapin’s.

What is interesting about the book?

To me, the text and photos address an interesting aspect of our dealings with death – the visitations and the curious mementos left behind by visitors. From guitar picks on Stevie Ray Vaughn’s marker, to a leather jacket on Joey Ramone’s grave. In my own travels, I’ve seen such things as beads and writing on Marie Laveau’s crypt (New Orleans’ most famous voodoo queen) and burnt candles left at Jack Kerouac’s grave. Perhaps it helps people feel close to someone in death whom they would’ve liked to have felt close to in life. Whatever the reason, the practice is certainly less destructive than everyone chipping off a piece of marble.

What did I get out of the book?

One of the many offshoots of fandom is our memorializing of the dead. Why do people visit gravesites? Why do I, personally, visit gravesites? (hmm…and Andy Warhol’s yet…) While some of us simply choose not to let go, others feel compelled to honor the memory because of how their lives were touched by the deceased. Memorials do the departed no good, they are all for us. Don McLean was wrong–when Buddy Holly’s plane crashed, it wasn’t the day the music died. The music lives on forever, and is a lasting testament to the mark made on the world by these talented musicians.

Are the actual directions to the gravesites given? No, and I find this to be a drawback. If I did actually want to snoop around Nancy Spungen’s grave in Bucks County, Pennsylvania (near my house), I am directed by the author to consult other books or websites for specific directions. Most of these celebrities are buried in non-celebrity cemeteries around the world. It’s not like walking through the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood, California where you can’t swing a cat without hitting a star’s grave (which I’ve done, by the way, but without the cat).

I’m not thrilled with the way the book is laid out. The contents are not in alphabetical order. Rather, the deceased are grouped into clusters such as “The Circle is Unbroken,” “A Beatle and a Stone,” and “The King is Dead.” Sometimes its obvious who’s in what group, but if you don’t travel in those circles, all you can do is scan the index for your party. The book is not comprehensive. If you didn’t know that Curt Cobain and Tupac Shakur were cremated, you might wonder why their gravesites are not included here.

Who would “Stairway To Heaven” appeal to?

If I were to guess, it would be the person whose musical hero has died. From Johnny Cash to Lisa Lopes to the New York Dolls, you can see the hero’s grave photo, find out generally where it’s located, and learn a little about how the hero succumbed.

We all have our heroes, and we miss them when they’re gone. Be they writers, actors, or musicians, their graves are visited for a variety of reasons. How society honors its dead is really the take-home message here. Who is to say that a military burial with a 21-gun salute is any more honorable than half a million drunken people a year visiting the grave of The Lizard King (Jim Morrison) in Paris’ Pere-LaChaise Cemetery? The book is a testimonial to our enduring spirit of memorializing the dead, those who’ve enriched our own lives in some way or other. Mourning is a very personal thing – there is no right or wrong way to do it.

But don’t be stuck in the past. While its fine to honor the dead, it may be more productive to honor the living. Put some of this energy into discovering new heroes, or see the falling star one last time before he leaves the building. I did that with Johnny Winter a few years ago. Always was one of my guitar gods, and I always wanted to see him. But his albinism has caused him massively debilitating health problems, to the point where he’s barely able to perform on stage. So when the opportunity came to see him at the House of Blues in New Orleans a few years ago, what did I do? I went. He was like a corpse with motorized fingers, but he kicked ASS, man! It was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.

Why would a photographer want to see this show?

From a photographic perspective, there are many images that prompt the photographer to think, “How did they DO that?” For example, the lightning between the woman’s fingertips.

But there are other images that cause one to one wonder who they were trying to kid. See for instance, the cutout fairies pasted onto the photo or the “levitating” chair featured in this article.

Was darkroom trickery invented the day after Daguerre made the first successful metal plate photo in 1839? Remembering that Photoshop was not extant, this begs the question: if it was okay to do this in the darkroom and have it perhaps considered art, why is digital photographic manipulation looked down upon by photographic purists? What were the purists saying about Man Ray at the height of his career? But I digress.

Why would others want to see this show?
The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult was essentially a history how advocates of spiritualism in the late 1800s, early 1900s tried to use photography to provide proof of the otherworldly: spirits of the dead, dreams, auras, and thoughts. An interesting use of the technology, as the Met reminds us that a unique characteristic of photography has always been its ability to record the visible, material world with truth and accuracy.

What was the exhibit like?

The show consists of loads of double-exposure parlor tricks of 1850s ghost photographs and scores of photos from public and private collections throughout Europe and North America. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibit focused primarily on the period from the 1860s to World War II, when occult and paranormal phenomena were most actively debated and both supporters and skeptics used photographs as evidence. The photos are exhibited on their own terms, without judgment or comment on their authenticity. Along with the groups of lame photos of hands “floating” from between two curtains, there were several scientific sections. One showed electromagnetic emanations (Kirlian photography) captured on film, and another, radiographs (x-rays). Think of the skeptics Willhelm Roentgen must have had when he told the world about his discovery of x-rays in 1895!

During the unveiling of the science of photography, no one quite knew its capabilities. Could it document spiritual presence during a seance? Roentgen knew only that x-rays (he called them this because of their unknown origin) could be used to photograph the inside (bones) of a human. Was it really that far-fetched to believe that some other form of photography could document our thoughts? I’d like to leave this discussion by telling you what I heard a young woman tell her four-year-old daughter at the show: “…this was from before we knew any better.” Everyone starts out as an opening act. If the ridiculed phrenologists didn’t come up with their theories in the early 1800s, our later understanding of the functions of various lobes of the brain might not have happened the way it did. (For a fascinating account of this, see Stanley Coren’s book, The Left-Hander Syndrome.)

Three Shockers
The naked spiritualist Eva C. -Juliette Alexandre-Bisson’s photographs of Eve C., the naked spiritualist introduces us to a great gimmick, if nothing else. Nothing up HER sleeve…! She’s featured on the cover of the book with the luminous apparition between her hands.

Ectoplasm – Sort of a milky or fabric-looking substance that allegedly exudes from the body of the medium and can be transformed into materialized limbs, faces and even the entire spirit bodies.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – There was a photograph showing Conan Doyle’s (author of the Sherlock Holmes stories) son Denis with his dead father’s likeness appearing above him. Conan Doyle was a true believer in spiritualism. The photo above, “Fairy Offering a Bouquet of Bluebells to Elsie,” was “authenticated” by Conan Doyle!

Parlor Tricks (My Favorite Photo!)

It was easy enough to create such an image on film with a box camera having a 10-second shutter speed-the “mortal” holds the pose and the “spirit” walks into the scene, pauses long enough to faintly materialize on film, then backs out. But think of how creative and difficult this must’ve been! Think of the outtake plates! As Georgia O’Keeffe (1977) said: “The cliffs over there, you look at it and it’s almost painted for you, you think until you try.”

Is the show worth seeing?
The 120 stunning and surprising works in this exhibition reflect an attempt to reconcile the physical and spiritual worlds. Much of the show as well as the book, deliver sometimes beautiful photographs of us – people – and what we sometimes believe. You really never experience anything without learning something new!

Photo References

Albert Von Schrenck-Notzing (Germany, May 17, 1912)
The medium Eva C., cover of book The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult.
Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright (British, 1908-1986 and 1901-1988)
Fairy Offering a Bouquet of Bluebells to Elsie, 1920
Edouard Isidore Buguet (French, b. 1840)
Fluidic Effect, 1875
Eugene Thiebault (French, b. 1825)
Henri Robin and a Specter, 1863

After attending the exhibition, “The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult,” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in November 2005, I realized I could never satisfy my curiosity for this work in a packed gallery. This was an entire subculture I knew nothing about! Luckily, the book was available.

The authors have extensive experience with occult photographs and consider it an important piece of the field’s history. (They are curators, also, of the exhibition.) While maintaining a strong non-judgmental position about the subject matter (spiritualism) in general, one of the authors, Sophie Schmit, is quoted as saying: “If I hadn’t considered at least the possibility of it existing,” she said, “I don’t think I would have ever been interested in doing the exhibit.” (Ref: strangeattractor.co.uk)

How is the book structured?
The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult is a huge coffee table book, containing over 200 color and black and white photographic reproductions. It is laid out in the three sections:

• Photographs of Spirits
• Photographs of Fluids
• Photographs of Mediums

Every time they click their Kodak pics, they steal a little bit of soul

This line from the John Prine song “Picture Show” alludes to the Native American belief that that the white man’s camera stole a piece of the subject’s soul. If we’re tempted to laugh at this now, let us realize that in the late 1800s, many people were just coming to grips with technology. X-Rays were just discovered. They could be used to see through your shoes to see if they were a proper fit for your feet! Was it really that farfetched to think that maybe technology could be used to contact the spirits of the dead? Many Americans at the time were hanging onto the memory of loved ones lost in our Civil War. Could they see them one last time? And the people providing this “service,” were they scoundrels or sincere practitioners? Who was in charge of deciding the limits of physical science? Was it an example of entrepreneurialism at its best…or at its worst?

The book is an interesting window into a period of American and European history (1870s – 1930s) in which many people thought that cameras had more than just the ability to capture the visible world. But indeed, it is entertaining. From a photographer’s perspective, it is simply amazing. From a historian’s perspective-who knew that Mary Todd Lincoln was a believer in spiritualism, held seances in the White House, and attempted to contact her late husband?

Content
This is not just a picture book. The authors of “The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult,” present an unbiased history of how advocates of spiritualism in the late 1800s to early 1900s tried to use photography to provide proof of the otherworldly: spirits of the dead, dreams, auras, and thoughts. It also holds fascinating accounts of the efforts of debunkers of the movement. Many luminaries were involved: P.T. Barnum, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the pioneering photographer, Jacques Henri Lartigue. Were these people loons? Were they duped? Feel free to decide for yourself. Any way you look at it, sensationalism sells newspapers. Consider Weegee, the pioneering tabloid photographer, and the entire genre he spawned! Was he good? Bad? Right or wrong?

The book appears to be comprehensive, without ever being tedious. All subjects covered were new to me, so they held my interest. Sure, you could easily believe charlatans would make attempts to dupe little old ladies out of a buck by offering to contact their loved ones in the great beyond-and there are many photographs of such parlor tricks. But I’d no idea people used to believe “fluids” called “ectoplasm” could be emitted from various orifices of a medium, with the medium’s thoughts projected onto the fibrous ectoplasm! See photo below, which was made by Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, the distinguished psychologist in 1911:

In summary, the book is most engaging. It informs us of a past many of us would choose to disbelieve. In fact, when I was at the exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I saw a woman in her late twenties kneeling next to her four-year-old daughter, saying: “…this was all from before we knew any better.” The authors’ goal is to present the past to us, without passing judgment. They are quite successful in doing this.

Does it leave you wanting more?
The chapter on “Thoughtography” left me with the urge to try this, or witness someone doing it. The idea is simple: Aim a Polaroid camera up against your head, project a thought into the camera, and snap the shutter. Your thought appears on film! Makes me wonder why you even need to snap the shutter…like when the scam “psychic” phones and asks for your credit card number-shouldn’t she already know it?

Do I recommend the book? Absolutely! It is of interest to people of varied purpose-photographers, spiritualists, debunkers of spiritualists, scientists, historians, sociologists, and the downright curious. All those with telekinetic powers…raise my hand!

Photo References
Mary Todd Lincoln with ghost of her dead husband
Taken by William H. Mumler, 1870-75
The medium Eva C. with the materialization of a woman’s face
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/12/warner.php