The Apparitionists Read online

It would be a bright and sunny day, but when Black arrived on Boston Common the grass was still stiff with frost. Together with his assistants, he carefully rolled out a massive pouch of stitched silk, then connected its open end to a portable hydrogen pump resembling an oversized casket on wheels. A fairly new contraption designed specifically for this purpose, the copper-lined wooden tank was filled with a solution of water and iron filings; adding sulfuric acid produced gas lighter than air that wanted nothing more than to escape the chamber in which it was born.

  With the acid introduced to the tank, the photographer watched as the shroud of smooth fabric stirred to life. It seemed to breathe, growing gradually with each inhalation of gaseous hydrogen, and slowly mounded like a pimple on the face of the earth. Then all at once it stirred and rose from the frosted grass.

  No expert balloonist, J. W. Black had spent half his years behind the camera, and all of them with his feet firmly on the ground. For guidance in this new interest, he turned to Samuel Archer King, New England’s preeminent aerialist. King had traveled from Providence, Rhode Island, to help Black see Boston from above. The balloon, which King called “Queen of the Air,” climbed more than twelve hundred feet over the common that day. The aerialist and the photographer floated beneath it in an attached basket for much of the afternoon, tethered by a rope to their launch site so they would not blow out to sea.

  Black’s images—the first aerial photographs taken anywhere in the United States—were a revelation. Within one frame, church steeples and storefronts, rooftops and alleyways, sailing ships and merchants’ carts, all were collected like odds and ends in a junk drawer. As the balloon rose higher into the thinning air and Black made more exposures, the city came to resemble the interlocking gears and springs of a pocket watch with its back popped off. From the jumbled landscape emerged a world moved by designs too grand to be seen.

  Not everyone found the images so astonishing. “The cow pasture character of our streets is finely presented,” a journalist wryly noted upon seeing the pictures later that month. Bostonians, being Bostonians, rarely allowed themselves to seem too keenly impressed. The change in perspective Black’s camera had provided, however, was not lost even on those sophisticates whose first impulse was bemusement.

  Residents of the Hub of the Universe imagined their city filled with the greatest minds in the nation. The birthplace of John Adams, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other notables would, they imagined, always loom large in the life of the nation. And now, on a cold and quiet autumn Sunday, Black had gone up into the clouds and come back down with evidence of how small the city really was.

  For a decade, new portrait studios had opened in Boston nearly as often as in New York, and indeed they soon seemed unremarkable in cities large and small. In these sorcerer’s shops where mirrors learned to remember, Americans had been subtly taught to think of photography as a means of affirming their own individual importance. Through the duration of the long seconds of aperture, with the photographer staring intently as he slowly counted down, every sitter in every portrait studio became a still point in the turning world. Narcissus peering into the water until the currents pulled him down was not far from the experience of stopping in for a quick sitting only to drown in the parlor’s lush curtains and the undivided attention of an artist who promised to turn every face into a masterpiece.

  Yet to see images taken from high above was to realize photography might show far more than previously imagined. It did not merely erase distance, as Morse imagined it would; it proposed to control space and time. As the same wag who bemoaned the city’s “cow pasture” streets noted, in Black’s images “Boston looks very much like a toy town that a boy has built of painted blocks.” What was the camera if not the all-seeing, eternally objective eye of God?

  Of all the photographers working in the city, J. W. Black was in many ways the perfect person to pose this question. He had begun his career at the elbow of the brilliant Boston daguerreotypist J. H. Lerow, whose gallery thrived at 91 Washington Street beginning in the 1840s. None of his images survive, so his technical acumen cannot be known, but from the earliest toddling steps of the art he had understood what captured images might mean to those who stood within them. They were a means for ordinary people to make stories of their meandering days. And when your memories did not measure up to the requirements of narrative, photographs of other people could be purchased from a rack on two-by-three-inch cards, and their lives could become part of your own.

  At around the time Black had learned the art from Lerow, the latter had placed in the newspapers a gripping yarn, likely written by himself, about a beautiful young woman who visited his studio one day. She was eager to have a picture taken for a locket she would give to her brother, who was headed out to sea the next day. Lerow sat her for a photograph, struck by features whose equal he had never seen. When sadly it came time for her to go—oh!—she discovered that she had lost her money. Lerow told her not to worry; she could have the photograph for free if she was willing to sit for another image, which he might keep for his shop’s small gallery. A year later, when he’d forgotten it was there, a wealthy regular customer happened in. Seeing the photograph of the woman hanging on the wall, this “rich, well educated, not in any way dissipated” young man insisted he had to meet its subject. By great good fortune he was able to find her. Penniless but still lovely, on the verge of falling into ill repute at the hands of scoundrels, she married the gentleman “ere that month had passed.”

  This sentimental saga, called “Love at First Sight—or—The Daguerreotype,” appeared in papers as far away as North Carolina. It filled five columns of a broadsheet and included a closing pitch, which of course was the hidden point of the whole tale. “We would be happy to remind them,” the story said of the newlyweds, “Mr. L has a happy knack for taking family groups.”

  To visit 91 Washington Street was to entwine one’s life with the rich and the beautiful, to participate in a fairy tale in which the rich received their due for virtue and the poor could find relief. As Black learned at Lerow’s side, photography was an act of mythmaking.

  Leaving his mentor’s tutelage soon after, he worked as a plate buffer for various other daguerreotypists, including Luther Holman Hale, scion of a scythe-manufacturing fortune who operated a studio one biographer said was filled with a “palace-like magnificence,” which included a pianoforte, various music boxes, and singing birds. Black then traveled as an itinerant photographer, where his open-air sitting sessions offered exposure to birds of other kinds. Through it all he was building toward taking pictures that suggested even the most intimate photographs could become windows on larger realities, ranging from celestial dramas—as when he turned his camera toward the night sky as a pioneer of astrophotography—to the national stage.

  Black photographed John Brown in his own Washington Street studio in May of 1859, while the abolitionist was in Boston gathering resources for the raid on Harpers Ferry he planned for later that year. The preacher turned guerrilla fighter and antislavery crusader had previously visited Black three years before. At that time, he was smooth-cheeked and awkward-looking; his broad mouth pulled tight at the lips like a knife wound slashed laterally across the lower part of his face. He had recently suffered a mild stroke, and the image Black made then showed signs of Bell’s palsy. It was later known as the “mad” photograph, proof that the zealot had lost his mind.

  The John Brown who entered Black’s studio in 1859 was by contrast as commanding a presence as a biblical patriarch. He had begun to grow a beard as a disguise in 1858, but the disguise had become the man himself. His beard flowed to the middle of his chest and called to mind, a soldier of his ragtag army later said, a “Puritan of the most exalted type.” This is the John Brown who would be known by history. He wore the beard only during the last year of his life, including to his execution in December 1859, and yet, thanks to a single portrait, he will always be remembered with it. The sto
ry of his life became contained and defined by a single moment staring into a camera.

  In his balloon and on the ground, Black showed how images could shape the past that came before them just as surely as what was yet to come.

  WHEN JAMES WALLACE BLACK met William Mumler two autumns later, the former had been taking pictures for twenty years; the latter for about as many days.

  H. F. Gardner, the local Spiritualist leader who had been so taken with Mumler’s original ghostly photograph, sensed he had stumbled onto something important. But perhaps because he had suffered embarrassment years earlier when the Harvard professors publicly grilled Kate and Margaret Fox, he wanted to have his discovery independently verified.

  As Mumler’s first and most convincing advocate, Gardner insisted he had no doubts. His desire to believe was reinforced by what he witnessed when he had an image taken of himself. On the glass before him he saw clearly a picture of his deceased son, now years gone. There was no question in his mind about the abilities of the photographer, whom he took to be not an artist but a “peculiar medium.” Despite his faith, however, he urged caution. “It behooves us as Spiritualists,” Dr. Gardner told a gathering of his fellow believers in Boston, “to carefully investigate and candidly inquire what cause there is for faith in this thing and also what cause there is for doubt and opposition. I told Mr. Mumler that if he abused the gift of his remarkable power, it would be taken from him; to see well that he made a good, wise, and generous use of a valuable gift. Greater gifts than this will be soon given to the earth.”

  For a technical appraisal, he went to the best in the city, a man whose expertise and reputation among Boston photographers were unimpeachable. Conveniently, Black’s studio was just blocks away from both Mumler’s engraving shop and the Spiritualist newspaper the Banner of Light, which had recently spread news of the “spirit photographs” across the city. Gardner brought one such image—showing himself surrounded by four unidentified spectral forms—and asked Black if he would be able to create a similar one using either his usual photographic implements or any “mechanical contrivance.” After scrutinizing the print, Black admitted that he could not.

  But a man who would go up in a balloon for his art was not the sort who would leave further investigations to others. Black began his personal inquiry by sending his assistant, Horace Weston, down Washington Street to Mrs. Hannah Stuart’s photo studio. There he was to request a sitting, giving no indication that his ulterior motive was to take notes and report back.

  Mumler seated Horace for a portrait as he would any customer. Posing him by a large window, he took the young man’s picture, developed it, and then supplied a photograph that seemed to show not only Horace’s own likeness, but that of his deceased father.

  Horace had been taught photography by the best in the city. If something was amiss in Mumler’s process, surely he would have spotted it. And yet he had not. “All I can say to Mr. Black,” he said to Mumler, admitting he had been sent there on a mission, “is that I have seen nothing different from taking an ordinary picture.”

  He left, but then returned a short time later, likely red in the face both from rushing up and down the street on this unusual errand and from embarrassment.

  “When I went back, they all came around me to hear my report,” he said of his coworkers at Black’s studio. “And when I told them that I had got a second form on the negative, but had seen nothing different in the manipulation from taking an ordinary picture, they shouted with laughter.” To his chagrin, they all thought he had been duped.

  Horace asked if Mr. Black himself might pay a visit. “If you will allow him the same privilege of witnessing the operation that you did me,” he said to Mumler, “and he gets a spirit form on the negative, he will give you fifty dollars.”

  “Tell Mr. Black to come,” Mumler said.

  A short time later, the great man arrived. For him the journey down Washington Street to Mumler’s door would have been no less fantastical than lifting off into the air over the common. In the one known photograph of the esteemed photographer, Black presents himself as an informed and worldly man, impeccably dressed and reading a folded newspaper with spectacles on his nose. He sits with his legs crossed in a comfortable chair, as if fully at ease with the universe and his place within it. Now here was this rumpled amateur claiming he had captured more with a camera than Black had ever dreamed.

  “Mr. Black, I have heard your generous offer,” Mumler said by way of greeting. “All I can say is, be thorough in your investigations.”

  “You may rest assured of that.”

  Mumler had prepared the studio in advance. His camera stood at the ready. “That is the instrument I propose to take your picture with,” he said. “You are at liberty to take it to pieces.”

  Black shrugged off the suggestion. He did not credit the man before him with enough knowledge to alter a camera’s functioning sufficiently to produce the images Dr. Gardner and his assistant Horace had presented to him.

  “That is all right,” he said.

  Next Mumler showed him the glass plate he intended to use.

  “Mr. Black, I propose to take your picture on this glass; you are at liberty to clean it.”

  Black took the glass from Mumler and examined it for spots or other signs that it had been tampered with. Holding it close to his face, he exhaled sharply, his breath fogging the clear surface. He decided it was clean enough, but assured the supposed spirit photographer he would be watching all that followed very closely.

  “I don’t lose sight of this plate from this time,” he said.

  The two men then moved to the sky-lit sitting room. Black sat facing a window for extra light while Mumler took his spot before him, poised beside the camera. He placed the plate in position, then raised the slide that would allow an image to be fixed on the glass.

  “All ready,” Mumler said.

  With a quick tug, he removed the cloth cover from the lens. The two men waited in stillness and silence as light filled the camera and transformed all it could see into shadows more enduring than reality—a small miracle in itself no matter what other events might transpire that day.

  “Mr. Mumler, I should be willing to bet one thing,” Black said. “That you have got my picture.”

  “So would I,” the spirit photographer replied.

  “And I guess that is all.”

  “Very likely,” Mumler agreed. “I do not get them every time.”

  Eager to give a skeptic as much control over the process as he wished, and perhaps in deference to his undoubtedly superior skills, Mumler led Black to the darkroom and suggested he might like to continue the developing process himself.

  “I would rather you develop the negative, Mr. Mumler,” Black insisted. “I am not acquainted with the working of your chemicals, and might spoil it.” Just in case the younger man took this as a compliment, Black quickly added, “You are not smart enough to put anything on that negative without my detecting it.”

  “I am well aware of that,” Mumler said.

  Standing in the darkness of the tiny room, Mumler opened a bottle of developer. He then tipped the plate in his hand and poured the chemical solution over the glass. This would produce the negative, with the whitest spots appearing blackest, an inversion of all the ways the eye wants to see. To an experienced photographer, reading a negative is simply like switching to a language known since birth but used only on certain occasions.

  Black watched as his own dark outline appeared on the glass, its form not unlike the photograph he’d had taken of himself seated with his newspaper. But then another shape began to emerge.

  “My God!” Black said. “Is it possible?”

  As Mumler would later remember, “Another form became apparent, growing plainer and plainer each moment, until a man appeared, leaning his arm upon Mr. Black’s shoulder.” The man later eulogized as “an authority in the science and chemistry of his profession” then watched “with wonder-stricken eyes” as the tw
o forms took on a clarity unsettling in its intimacy.

  Earlier, when he had heard his assistant Horace’s account of seeing a dead parent revived on glass, he had likely been dismissive but not entirely unsympathetic. Black himself had been orphaned at the age of thirteen; his father’s sudden death had set him on course to learn the art of the daguerreotype from Lerow, and then to become a self-made man who was brave enough to fly above the city with only silk and hydrogen as wings. He was a creature of experiment and certainty; the figure at his shoulder on Mumler’s negative was the very shape of mystery.

  Black did not remain long enough to ask questions, but he did ask if he could take the image with him. Mumler varnished it, as any portrait artist might, then handed the finished product to his fellow photographer.

  “How much is to pay?” Black asked.

  “Not a cent,” Mumler said.

  Blackwell’s Island inmate. Engraving from a daguerreotype by Mathew Brady, 1846.

  CHAPTER 8

  She Really Is a Wonderful Whistler

  IT WAS THE kind of assignment one might take only for reasons of either desperation or true belief.

  Mathew Brady’s first significant job as a photographic artist would be to travel out over the dark waters of the East River to the prison, and there to spend enough time with criminals that he would be able to reproduce their images. Many of them dangerous, few of them pleasant, they had been convicted of crimes ranging from theft to arson to assault. As far as he knew, there were no murderers among them, at least no one who had been convicted of that crime. In the pre–mug shot era, the taking of such pictures was not standard procedure, and it would not be a rushed affair. Rather, Brady’s work would be to create posed daguerreotype portraits requiring the same time, skill, and care as those offered to the New York gentry for several dollars apiece.

  The ideological purpose of these portraits was immediately obvious. With his camera, Brady was to provide case studies bolstering the notion that “cerebral organization” was responsible for behavior, inclination, character, and even crime.