Houdini And The Ghost Of Abraham Lincoln – Antique Wall Art
(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)
Description
Few images capture their era like this historic image of Houdini And The Ghost Of Abraham Lincoln. It comes from the collections of the Library of Congress, scanned from the original and carefully restored.
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Houdini And The Ghost Of Abraham Lincoln
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A lantern slide pairing Houdini with a ghostly Abraham Lincoln turns a spirit photograph into a trick on the viewer. The image draws on the spirit photography craze of the early 1920s, when photographers used double exposures to place faint, apparently supernatural figures beside living sitters. Harry Price, a psychical researcher and librarian of the Magicians' Club of London, laid out the method in his 1922 article "Cold Light on Spiritualistic Phenomena," which Houdini admired as an exposé. Houdini spent much of his later career unmasking mediums, and this slide shows how easily a camera could be made to lie.
| Created / published | c. 1920-1930 |
|---|---|
| Medium | slide, lantern |
| Notes | SUMMARY: Was that a spirit or a double exposure? Harry Price was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, Librarian of the Magicians' Club of London and a member of the Society of American Magicians when, in 1922, his article Cold Light on Spiritualistic Phenomena" was published in the "Journal of the Society for Psychical Research." Houdini valued this expose of how a photographer could produce fraudulent "spirit photographs" that purportedly documented the apparition and social interaction of figures from beyond. Demonstrating the company he could keep if the right technique were employed Houdini had himself photographed with the ghost of Abraham Lincoln." |
| Source | Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division |
| Original scan | 1,800 × 1,546 px · prints to 6 × 5 in at 300 dpi |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-HPA-115323 |
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