The Case Against Spirit Photographs Classic Reprint

Excerpt from The Case Against Spirit Photographs

Supernormal Pictures has, for example, been formed recently, and it is by no means uncommon to meet people who owe much of their belief in Spiritualism to the results they have obtained through photographic mediums. This considerable public interest would alone suffice to make the subject important, but, apart from this, it is clear that if all or even a fraction - oi what is claimed be true the phenomenon must be of unique value from the point of view of strictly scientific research.

Photographic phenomena differ from practically all others studied by psychical researchers in being, so to Speak, permanently Objective. If one could be sure that the results obtained were not due to trickery one would be in a far better position as regards the problems of their origin and so forth than one is in the case of other types of physical phenomena. One could collect Spirit photographs, compare them with one another, correlate their differences with the varying conditions of their production, and generally study them at leisure - a procedure which is not possible with table-levitations, materialisations, or direct voice phenomena 1 The photographic plate would, in fact, be the most powerful of all weapons of research if only we could eliminate all possibility of fraud. This is, as usual, the crux of the whole matter, and, as my collaborator and I hope to Show, it is not nearly so easy to do as might appear at first sight.

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