September 27 – December 31, 2005
The Harriette and Noel Levine Gallery and
the Howard Gilman Gallery 

“A unique characteristic of photography has always been its ability to record the visible, material world with truth and accuracy.

Interestingly, advocates of spiritism at the turn of the last century enlisted photography to provide manifest proof of the immaterial: emanations and auras; thoughts, hallucinations, and dreams; or the spirits of the deceased.

Closer to the scientific revelations of the X-ray (discovered in 1896) than to the double-exposure parlor tricks of 1850s ghost photographs, the more than 120 stunning and surprising works in this exhibition reflect an attempt to reconcile the physical and spiritual worlds.” 

For more information, please visit the museum’s web site www.metmuseum.org/home.asp.

Eugène Thiébault (French, b. 1825)
Henri Robin and a Specter, 1863
Albumen silver print; 22.9 x 17.4 cm
Collection Gérard Lévy, Paris

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Theodor Prinz  (German, act. 1900s)
Ghost, ca. 1900 Gelatin silver print;
22.8 x 17 cm
Private collection