Tuesday 18 July 2017

Spirit photographs under the hammer


If anyone harboured a doubt that original spirit photographs are valuable objects, it would have been dispelled by the sale on 11 July of an album of prints at Sotheby’s.  The estimate was £2-3,000, and they went for £10,000, plus buyer’s premium of 25%, making a grand total of £12,500.  The lot was described as ‘Spirit Photographs--Hudson, Frederick (and others) ALBUM OF 29 PHOTOGRAPHS. [C.1872]’. 

Contained in a scrapbook, of the same vintage, were 29 albumen prints, 24 mounted on card, 2 unmounted and 3 cartes-de-visite, including one by Frederick Hudson, captioned and signed by Georgiana Houghton on the reverse:  "...I was seated in the place where the figure appears, but my face was in the opposite direction - I am invisible and the spirit is apparent...", with a date of 4 April 1872.  In addition there were three press cuttings.  The album was described as having ‘green roan-backed cloth boards, upper cover stamped in gilt 'Scrap Book', spine worn with loss, covers bowed, some wear.’

A note in the catalogue stated that ‘The majority of the photographs are evidently the work of a single photographer and are highly reminiscent of known photographs by F.M. Parkes.’  Parkes was working at the same time as Hudson but is far less well known today.  Georgiana Houghton was a spirit medium, artist and writer, and associate of Hudson’s.

A figure well over the estimate for spirit photographs is by no means unprecedented.  In 2013 an album of 27 photographs taken during Thomas Glendenning Hamilton’s séances at his home in Winnipeg in the 1920s, and copiously annotated, sold, with buyer’s premium, for the enormous sum of US$93,750 (estimate $4-6,000) – the kind of number that makes museum curators swallow nervously as they reassess the security of their collections.

Admittedly that was an unusually large amount.  The following year a series of lots comprising photographs by Richard Boursnell and J. Evans Sterling, and Craig and George Falconer, went for more realistic prices: $3,000 with premium (estimate $2,500-$3,500) for five Boursnell and Sterling images, and the same for eight Falconer brothers photographs (estimate $1,000-$1,500).  Surprisingly ten cartes-de-visite taken by Hudson and annotated by Houghton remained unsold (estimate $4-6,000).

The market for spirit photography is in good health, and as the Hamilton sale indicates, post-Victorian images can achieve high prices.  Such sales are not confined to high-end auctioneers like Sotheby’s either – single original images occasionally appear on eBay among the junk, though they often struggle to sell at the prices asked, perhaps because their authenticity (referring to the artefact rather than the content) is less certain than it would be if sold through a reputable auction house, with its access to experts.

One unfortunate by-product of these prices, however, is that it is likely, when good quality material turns up, it will go back to private collectors with deep pockets and not be available to researchers.  Such collections as those of the Society for Psychical Research and (especially) the College of Psychic Studies are rich sources for the serious study of spirit photography but these institutions do not have the funds to compete for fresh acquisitions.  Instead they rely on donations, and for the owner who can realise a significant sum by selling, the chances are that the auction house will be the preferred destination.