More than Corpses, Less than Ghosts:

A Visual Theory of Culture in Early

Ethnographic Photography

GREGORY DELAPLACE

In its intent to make “culture” visible through the objective depiction of specific scenes of indigenous life, ethnographic
photography at the turn of the twentieth century could be understood against two other scientific uses of the camera at
that time: the anatomic photographs of physical anthropologists, on the one hand, and the ghost photographs of spiritu-
alist circles, on the other. Indeed, while capturing “culture” involved having more than still bodies appear on the picture,
which implied elaborate apparatuses meant to make it happen in front of the camera lens, early ethnographers were
anxious not to let too much appear either, as “culture” was supposed to manifest itself more subtly than the ghosts re-
vealed through spirit photography. This article thus argues that photographing “culture” at the turn of the twentieth
century meant getting its invisibility right; it describes some of the devices and operations early ethnographers used to
make it appear objectively. [anthropometry, culture, ethnography, Franz Boas, spirit photography, the invisible]

Introduction In a similar fashion, photography’s potential to pro-

duce incontrovertible documents of bodily shapes, arti-

I
n his famous address to the Chamber of Deputies,
François Arago (1839) proposed a rather cunning
argument to promote Louis Daguerre and Nicephore
Niepce’s invention, the daguerrotype, to his audience
of politicians. Surely, he said, what was already called
“photography” shall mark a significant improvement
on drawing as a swifter and more faithful representa-
tion of visible reality, and it shall therefore constitute
a better instrument for producing objective data, pre-
served from any distortion caused by the subjectivity
of the observer. More excitingly, though, photography’s
true contribution to science and to the broadening of
human knowledge should actually be what he called
“the unforeseen” (l’imprévu), that is, that whose exis-
tence we do not suspect yet, and which photography
will indeed come to reveal. Arago was able to provide
two precedents in support for his claim: the telescope
and the microscope. Both had been invented to get a
better view of what we already knew, and both ended
up revealing entire worlds we had no idea about: con-
stellations of planets, on the one hand, and myriads of
“animalculi,” on the other.
facts, and forms of habitat was only part of its appeal
for anthropologists at the turn of the twentieth century.
Of course, the generalized use of photography bore the
promise of a perfectly objective rendering of artifacts
and ways of life all over the globe—a most welcome one
at a time when anthropologists felt they could never
vouch for the objectivity of data they had not collected
themselves. Yet, and in accordance with Arago’s pre-
diction, there was something more to photography for
anthropologists, another promise, more promising as it
were, if more ambiguous: that of making things appear
that were not quite, or not as visible otherwise. If, indeed,
the subject matter of anthropology—“culture”—should be
defined at that time as “a complex whole which includes
knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other
capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of
society” (Tylor 1871, 1), then rendering it would involve
more than objective descriptions of knowledge, and of
belief, and of law, and of morals, and so on. Describing
“culture” should also include an actual account of its
“wholeness”: the invisible thread, as it were, which bun-
dles up these cultural components into a totality.

Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 35, Issue 1, pp. 37–49, ISSN 1058-7187, online 1548-7458. © 2019 American Anthropological Association. DOI: 10.1111/var.12177.
38    VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 35 Number 1 Spring 2019

As Christopher Pinney (2011, 29–32), among oth-

ers, has already pointed out, Tylor himself believed
that language was rather poorly suited for this task;
“pictures,” in his opinion, performed much better.
Thus, in his introduction to The History of Mankind by
Friedrich Ratzel (published in English in 1896), Tylor
praised the quality and profusion of illustrations fea-
tured in the book (1,160 in total, mostly chromolitho-
graphic plates and engravings made after nature or
photographs), saying they would be extremely helpful
for museum collections in order to know more about
the specific use of particular artifacts. He added that, at
a deeper level, these images might also provide us with
a representation of primitive life that language could
not produce. Indeed, given the simplicity of primitive
forms of culture, any “group-­picture” (Figure 1) had,
according to him, the potential of being “something
like a real representation of their life as a whole” (Tylor
1896, vi).

The group-­pictures, which show not only the bod-

ies but the conditions of a rude race, illustrate this
stratification of culture in a suggestive if rough
educational way. Here in the frontispiece of the
first volume the Bushman leans against a rock,
which also conveniently supports his knobkerry;
in his hand is the pipe of antelope-­horn for smok-
ing hemp; one child is splitting a bone for marrow
with a stone implement […], while another child
carries a bull-­roarer […]; the wife carries ostrich-­
eggs in a net, and round her neck are teeth strung
as charms, while her glass beads, made probably
at Murano, show the beginnings of contact with
the civilized world; the small bow with its quiver
of poisoned arrows, and the water-­ skin which
makes life possible in the thirsty desert, fills up
the foreground of the picture. (Tylor 1896, vi)
It seems rather striking that Tylor describes these ele-
ments one after the other, refraining from stating at any
time how exactly their association might represent the
“life” of the Bushmen “as a whole.” As if, perhaps, this
was precisely what the picture itself was supposed to do,
as if there was indeed something that appeared in it that
language, or artifacts examined one after the other, could
not quite get at. As if a description of each element com-
posing “culture” was not complete until a depiction was
provided of what made them part of a whole.
How may one go about producing photographic
pictures of a “culture” that does not just come read-
FIGURE. 1. “A Bosjesman Family.” Frontispiece of The History of
Mankind by F. Ratzel, 1896. [This figure appears in color in the
online issue.]
ily observable, that has to be made visible, yet in an
objective way? This conundrum, of course, as Latour
(1988) and others have shown, is common to more or
less any kind of scientific pursuit. Yet, I would like to
propose here that it posed itself in a specific way for
anthropology at that time, due to what one might call
the particular regime of visibility of “culture.” Against
Tylor’s initial optimism, it has since been argued that
photography, as an exclusively visual technology of
inscription, could just be ill-­suited to capture the mul-
tisensorial dimensions of rituals and other anthropo-
logically meaningful experiences (Hastrup 1992), and
that its inevitable failure to do so could only be coun-
terbalanced by the illustration it gave again and again
that crucial aspects of cultural life were indeed (visi-
bly) invisible (Suhr 2015, see also Lynteris and Prince
2016, 106–7). As I hope will become clear in the rest
of this article, early ethnographers such as Franz Boas,
George Hunt, and Alfred C. Haddon were quite aware
that picturing culture indeed involved more than just
documenting what was immediately perceivable, that
it required particular dispositions and protocols—that it
entailed, in short, a specific work (in the sense of Latour

Gregory Delaplace is a lecturer in social anthropology at the University Paris Nanterre and a fellow of the Institut
Universitaire de France.

1988, 60). It is precisely the kind of work necessary to
make culture appear in print—the ambiguities of what
Elizabeth Edwards (2016, 90) called an “emerging com-
plex objectivity”—that I propose to examine here, by
browsing through some scopic and interactional appa-
ratuses implemented in order to do so.
I thus hope to be able to sketch out the “visual
theory” of culture—to borrow a term coined by Mar-
ilyn Strathern (2013, 24)—that comes out from early
ethnographic photographs in Europe and the United
States. Like Strathern with Melanesian body decora-
tions, axes, and netbags, I propose here to look at early
ethnographic photography wondering “what people do
make to be seen, and ask[ing]: When people display
objects, artifacts, and so forth precisely as ‘things’ to
be displayed, what invitation are they making, what is
behind the invitation to the audience to see?” (Strath-
ern 2013, 25, emphasis in original). What did ethnog-
raphers invite viewers to see when they took pictures
at the turn of the twentieth century, and how did they
go about doing so? In this process, and in accordance
with Strathern’s own method, I will draw as much on
what anthropologists actually say about their taking
pictures as on their pictures themselves. To borrow Lor-
raine Daston and Peter Galison’s words, in turn, I hope
to show “how epistemic virtues can be inscribed in
images, in the ways they are made, used, and defended
against rivals” (2007, 42)—what epistemic virtue can be
seen to derive from early ethnographers’ visual theory.
Further drawing on Daston and Galison, I will pro-
pose that the photography of “culture” at that time,
its good practice one might say, could be better teased
out in contrast with two other uses: the anatomic
photographs of physical anthropologists, on the one
hand—its one true “rival”—and the ghost photographs
of spiritualist circles, on the other, which developed in
parallel with ethnographic photography. Photograph-
ing “culture,” for anthropologists at the turn of the
twentieth century, precisely involved producing images
that were different from these, and cultivating a differ-
ent brand of “epistemic virtue,” informed by a different
yet implicit visual theory. Here, as in the Melanesian
case (Strathern 2013, 25, 75–76, 94), the visual theory
of early ethnographic photography relied on the set-
ting up of a particular interplay between some things
hidden and some things revealed. More precisely, the
epistemic virtue sustaining the production of ethno-
graphic photography entailed the ability to hide cer-
tain things—or rather, as we shall see, to hide the right
amount of things (enough, yet not too much)—so as
not only to leave others visible but also to make yet
another one appear (culture) that was not, or not quite
visible in the first place.
More than Corpses, Less than Ghosts  Delaplace   39
Crucial in the process of letting things appear
through an interplay between things hidden and things
revealed is the configuration of backdrops. Actually, the
differences between the three parallel uses of scientific
photography I propose to review here could almost be
boiled down to three contrasted uses of the backdrop.
Indeed, each type of backdrop, or more broadly each
method of framing photographs, produced a specific
assemblage of visibility and hiding, so to speak, each
with a purpose to allow different things, otherwise
invisible, to appear—or to prevent them from doing so.
Along the way, an important distinction will thus have
to be made between the hidden, which needs only to be
uncovered or included within the frame to become vis-
ible, and the invisible, which may only become visible
through the interplay of hidden and visible aspects of
the pictured reality.
More than Corpses: Capturing “Culture” as
Opposed to Picturing Bodies
In his most recent rendering of what he called “the
doubled history of photography and anthropology,”
Christopher Pinney (2011, 17–62) pitched out two rad-
ically different—and yet effectively coexisting—ways
in which anthropologists have gone about using pho-
tography in various parts of the world (see also Ed-
wards [2016] for a more detailed discussion of this ri-
valry). These two methods—one could almost speak of
ethical stances in this case—were championed by two
very different characters, who in the last decade of the
nineteenth century each published a short manifesto
in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
of Great Britain and Ireland on the (right) uses of the
camera in anthropology.
The first, Everard im Thurn, is a bit of an eclectic
figure: a botanist, a writer, a photographer, and an
ethnography enthusiast, he would become the pres-
ident of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1919.
His career as a colonial administrator led him to spend
several years in British Guiana, where he took partic-
ular interest in the Amerindian populations, staying
with Arawak, Warau, and Carib groups for extended
periods of time, living “as they do” (im Thurn 1893,
187). In his richly illustrated 1892 address to the Royal
Anthropological Institute, pronounced in the presence
of Tylor himself, he distinguished between two pos-
sible “anthropological uses of the camera.” While the
first was concerned mostly with anthropometry, and
with man “in its strictly physiological aspects” (1893,
184), the other, his own, aimed at “the accurate record
not of the mere bodies of primitive folk […] but of
40    VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 35 Number 1 Spring 2019

this folk regarded as living beings” (1893, 184). The
overt purpose of im Thurn’s article was indeed to pro-
mote the second pursuit over the first, which, he wrote
rather scornfully, would be better performed on dead
bodies, given that the main difficulty it posed was to
get sitters to stay still. “Anatomic photographs,” as
he called them, really are pictures of “lifeless bodies”
(86), of corpses. Photographing the “life” of primitive
people, on the other hand, their culture, posed diffi-
culties which according to him were far less easy to
overcome, and the purpose of his article was precisely
to address these.
Although im Thurn’s assessment might sound dis-
missive and caricaturing, proper anthropometric pho-
tography indeed explicitly involved representing bodies
that were temporarily, yet absolutely, stripped of their
particular demeanor and removed from their immediate
surroundings. This has been stated in so many words in
another article, published just three years afterward, by
yet another anthropologist named Maurice Vidal Port-
man (1896), who is mostly known for his work among
the Andamanese, where he sojourned for about twenty
years as the Officer in Charge for the Royal Indian
Marine. Portman’s article meant to provide “practical”
advice to “explorers” as to how photography should
be used for recording “ethnographic facts” (Portman
1896, 76). This included documenting crafts and “the
manufacture of different implements, weapons, […] and
indeed almost every act of the life of a primitive peo-
ple” (77), yet his own specialty was in what he called
“physiognomy.” In both cases, he said, “properly taken
photographs” (76) should first and foremost evidence
“facts about which there can be no question” (Read
quoted by Portman 1896, 76), which seemingly mostly
involved preventing a certain number of things. First
of all, the “explorer” must not let anything trouble the
plain view of the subject, neither the external condi-
tions nor his own aesthetic tastes.
1896, 76). One can see here (Figure 2) an application
of this protocol by Portman himself. A central piece
in this apparatus was indeed the backdrop, covered in
checkers of identical size, called the “Lamprey grid”
after John H. Lamprey, who introduced it in 1869 as
an addition to Thomas Henry Huxley’s then already
consensual method for anthropometric photogra-
phy (Spencer 1992, 100–103). This backdrop had at
least two purposes: first of all, and most obviously,
it ensured the scaling and absolute commensurability
of human bodies with one another across the globe.
It also had a slightly less obvious consequence, how-
ever: by covering the entirety of the background, this
perfectly opaque backdrop effectively abstracted sit-
ters from their immediate environment, allowing their
body to be not only fully commensurable but also
plainly and exclusively visible. Anthropometric pho-
tography indeed demanded that no interference dis-
turbed the visibility of the sitters’ body; it supposed,
in other words, a process of purification whereby part
of them only had to appear on film. Subjects were
not allowed, in particular, to bring in their behavior
together with their body, nor their personal agenda

For ethnology, accuracy is what is required. Deli-

cate lighting and picturesque photography are not
wanted; all you have to see to is, that the general
lighting is correct, and that no awkward placing
of weapons or limbs hide important objects. (Port-
man 1896, 77)

This anxiety to ensure plain visibility of the pho-

tographed subject even intensified when the purpose
of photography was to document “physiognomy”:
then, the sitter had to be “stark naked”; “a full face and
profile view should be taken of each, and the subject FIGURE. 2. Andamanese Islander photographed by M. V. Portman,
should touch a background painted in black and white c. 1893 (British Library, Portman Collection). [This figure appears
chequers [sic], each exactly 2 inches square” (Portman in color in the online issue.]

for that matter, doing so being the telltale sign of a
“bad sitter,” one to be dismissed on the spot.
If a subject is a bad sitter […], send him away and
get another, but never lose your temper, and never
show a savage that you think he is stupid or, on
the other hand, allow him to think that, by play-
ing the fool, he can put off your work, or that
to stop him you will be willing to bribe him into
silence. (Portman 1896, 76–77)
A “bad sitter,” it seems, was a subject who refused to
become an object, the purified focus of scientific gaze.
Conversely, anthropometric photography supposed that
sitters appeared to the camera not only in plain visibil-
ity but also, and more crucially perhaps, in the visible
part of them only. Through its material setting and the
discipline it forced upon subjects, the epistemological
apparatus of anthropometric photography was supposed
to allow the perfect and perfectly scaled recording of
visible reality only. Within this apparatus, the fully cov-
ering backdrop made sure that nothing happened and
that nothing appeared but what was already visible, by
preventing any kind of communication or connection
with what lay beyond it. This opaque backdrop was
supplemented with a symmetrical fourth wall between
the photographer and his sitter, as Portman makes it
clear that no communication whatsoever should occur
between them. The stillness of “physiognomic” photo-
graphs, their lifelessness according to im Thurn, was
indeed ensured by the imperviousness of their frame,
the certainty that subjects were shown in isolation from
what might happen around and in relation to them.
As for im Thurn, meanwhile, photographing
“primitive folk” as “living beings”—like photograph-
ing “culture” for subsequent anthropologists—involved
something else, which was explicitly something more.
Indeed, one of the complaints im Thurn had against
actual pictures of “living primitive folks” was precisely
that they did not do enough to capture their “life,” no
more at least than taxidermists managed to revive the
animals they treated.
Just as the purely physiological photographs of
the anthropometrists are merely pictures of lifeless
bodies, so the ordinary photographs of uncharac-
teristically miserable natives […] seem comparable
to the photographs which one occasionally sees of
badly stuffed and distorted birds and animals. (im
Thurn 1893, 186)
In other words, it is not enough to not obviate cul-
ture for it to become palpable to a viewer. For im Thurn,
More than Corpses, Less than Ghosts  Delaplace   41
this is where lay the particular talent of the anthropolo-
gist as a photographer: making culture as “life” appear.
This, he insisted, required long-­term familiarity with the
“natives,” but not only: one also had to focus on spe-
cific situations—“dramatic representations of ordinary
incidents in their work-­a-­day life” (1893, 197)—or catch
with a camera some responses to the photographic set-
ting itself.
One of the anthropologists most dedicated to grasp-
ing culture visually at that time and in the few decades
afterward was Franz Boas, who, together with several
collaborators—including George Hunt, of course—gath-
ered one of the most impressive collection of ethno-
graphic photography of all time. So much has been
written on Boas and photography (e.g., Jacknis 1984;
Kendall et al. 1997), let alone on Boas and ethnography,
that anything one may say on one topic or the other
could only be partial, most of all in such a small space
as that which I am willing to allow here. Of course,
Boas is known for developing a different conception
of culture than Tylor, and a different approach to its
study, which would end up laying the groundwork for a
wholly different brand of anthropology. Yet he is known
also for refraining from proposing a clear definition of
this concept until very late in his career, contributing—
at least according to Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluck-
hohn (1952, 151)—to the subsequent confusion that has
surrounded the notion of culture in anthropology ever
since.
George W. Stocking (1966) has shown that Boas’s
conception of culture had dramatically evolved through-
out his writing, transitioning from a more “humanist”
definition of the notion in 1894, rather close to the
Tylorian one, to its “anthropological” reconfiguration
around 1911 (see also Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952,
45). Therefore, rather than to a guilty disinterest on
Boas’s part in precisely defining “culture,” the confu-
sion that Kroeber and Kluckhohn evidenced fifty years
after around this concept might be due to its original
indeterminacy, its openness even. Was “culture” a uni-
fied principle, more or less present across human soci-
eties and indicative of human progress in general (what
Stocking called the “humanist” definition)? Or rather
the singularity that distinguished one population from
the next one, indeed making the variability of cultures
the real purpose of ethnography (what Stocking called
the “anthropological” definition)? Perhaps it could be
surmised that instead of definitely choosing between
one definition or the other, anthropologists studying
“culture” at the end of the nineteenth century and the
beginning of the twentieth loosely oscillated between
the two. Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s almost exhaustive
survey (1952, 149–50) showed that few anthropolo-
42    VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 35 Number 1 Spring 2019
gists after Tylor and before the 1930s had ventured to
give a precise definition to what it was exactly they
were studying. What I would like to suggest here is
that whichever textual definition of culture might be
deduced from anthropologists’ writings at that time, a
common broad visual theory of this notion could be
seen to emerge from their images, whereby culture
appeared as something otherwise invisible that had to
be made manifest through specific protocols. This visual
theory was indeed practically oriented, less toward what
culture actually was and more toward how to make it
manifest.
One particularly striking protocol stands out from
a series of nine photographs taken at Fort Rupert on
Vancouver Island in late November 1894 by Franz Boas,
George Hunt, and their assistant photographer of the time
Oregon C. Hastings (Figure 3). These images were meant
to provide material for the setting up of a diorama on
traditional crafts at the American Museum of National
History in New York (Jacknis 1984, 14); they focused on
one female character, a “Kwakiutl” (Kwakwaka’wakw)
elderly woman who had been asked by Boas and Hunt
to demonstrate the various stages of cedar bark shred-
ding, spinning, weaving, and so on. In all these pictures,
which were probably taken on the same day, the woman
sits facing the camera, or three quarters, performing
her craft next to a cedar bark cradle suspended from
a wooden prop with a cedar rope used to rock it. What
makes these pictures intriguing at first glance is that, on
every one of them, Boas and Hunt (among others) can
be seen holding up a dark blanket behind the woman
FIGURE. 3. Kwakiutl woman demonstrating cedar bark technology, Vancouver Island, F. Boas, O. C. Hastings, and G. Hunt, 1894 (Image
#11608, American Museum of Natural History Library).
and the cradle, as if to conceal a row of picket fences
and a Canadian wooden house that nevertheless remain
partially visible. This seems to suggest that the picture
has been taken in the middle of surroundings that were
deemed not completely consistent with the scene. It
suggests, in other words, something like an illusion of
cultural actuality, the anachronic transplantation of a
“culture” that was not really there, and the simultane-
ous obscuring of an acculturated context deemed irrel-
evant. By asking the photographer to step back in order
to reveal what the backdrop actually concealed, Boas
appears to redeem himself as an ethical scientist: yes, he
“reconstructed” reality, but at least he admitted it! This is
how at least these pictures have been commented upon.
Boas’s own method of photography in the field
involved staging scenes, in collaboration with
Indians, to portray the precontact past. But Boas
occasionally pulled the camera back to playfully
reveal his own fakery. […] In this case, document-
ing his own process of documentation, Boas en-
sured that later generations would be able to sepa-
rate the reconstruction from the reality. (Miller &
Mathé 1997, 29)
I would like to challenge this interpretation of Boas,
Hunt, and Hasting’s intentions when they arranged the
shooting set in this fashion, the idea that their pur-
pose was to create a “fakery” while revealing it in the
same gesture. That they intended to create an illusion
of unblemished “Kwakiutl culture” is rather unconvinc-

ing in the first place, as several other pictures make
clear that neither Boas nor his colleagues had any prob-
lem showing how Kwakiutl culture was influenced by
Canadian settlers. In his 1909 monograph The Kwakiutl
of Vancouver Island, some pictures of “Kwakiutl” cos-
tumes are shown that were even taken against the very
same fences—which probably belonged to Hunt’s fam-
ily (Jacknis 1984, 14)—without any other background
this time and thus fully visible (Boas 1909, plate XXIX).
The cedar bark technology series was also included in
this volume, although partially touched up (Boas 1909,
plates XXVII, XXVIII, XXXI): Boas and Hunt’s presence
has been erased, but the picket fences are still left vis-
ible around or rather behind the blanket, which now
seems to be eerily hanging up in the air.
It could also be pointed out that had these pic-
tures been meant to be actually cropped, and had the
backdrop just been used to abstract the sitter from her
surroundings, then Boas, Hunt, and Hastings would
probably have chosen a lighter color for it. This is
indeed what they did when they wanted to photograph
“Kwakiutl” costumes in the very same expedition (see
Jacknis 1984, 17, fig. 7): pictures taken against a white
backdrop not only allowed for an easy cropping but
also brought out more clearly the precise shape and
motifs of the costume. The fact they chose a dark back-
ground in this one series could be taken to suggest that
the subject matter of these pictures was not exactly
the same as when they photographed costumes or arti-
facts. Boas’s purpose in this case was probably not so
much to show what the costume, the cedar bark cradle,
or the cedar weaving gesture actually looked like (as
traditional “Kwakiutl” artifacts), but what happened
when all these were assembled in a culturally mean-
ingful fashion. In order to show this, he had to start by
making it appear convincingly and objectively, thus
by eliciting a real—if artificial—cultural scene. I would
therefore propose that the backdrop was not meant to
obviate what was behind (the picket fences), but rather
to allow something to occur in front of it; rather than
obscuring the background for the viewer, it was meant
to do something for the sitter. Instead of tricking the
first, it was meant to assist the second, by creating a
space—seemingly an artificial domestic interior—that
was consistent with her performance and thus favor-
able to the proper effectuation of a technical process;
to the real manifestation of “Kwakiutl culture,” as it
were.
What Boas and his colleagues tried to get at
through this photographic apparatus, therefore, was
a reality just behind the visible and actual reality—a
reality that, in the context of cultural change, had to
be brought to the front in order to become actually
More than Corpses, Less than Ghosts  Delaplace   43
graspable. This is what this partially covering back-
drop could be regarded to actually do: rather than
obviating the context, it created a context within the
context, a space where “culture” could happen as a
result of ethnographic encounter. We know indeed
that such “staging” of culture was carefully negoti-
ated (Jacknis 1984; Mathé and Miller 1997, 40): Boas
did not instruct Native Americans to perform what
he thought their culture was. Together with Hunt, he
elicited cultural performances, proposed costumes,
suggested additions, and caused people to remember
what they thought they had forgotten. The fourth
wall in these pictures is as porous as the backdrop:
the photographic apparatus Boas, Hunt, and Hast-
ings implemented in them opens a field of vision that
acts as a space of (playful) interaction, where “cul-
ture” may suddenly become manifest, as a result of
the photograph’s subjects being as partially removed
from their surroundings as they are partially con-
nected to them.
Less than Ghosts: Capturing “Culture” as
­Opposed to Conjuring Spirits
It was indeed a thin line that separated the earnest elic-
itation of cultural truth from the complacent manufac-
ture of exotic lies, and the epistemic virtue cultivated
by anthropologists at the time, as photographers of
“culture,” required knowing how not to cross it—how to
stage culture without forging it. What is rather striking
in this respect is the ambiguous, relative, and pragmatic
limit given to the extent to which reality could actu-
ally be tampered with: “not too much” was indeed the
measure indicated by Alfred C. Haddon, when reflecting
back on his ethnographic method during the 1899 Cam-
bridge Torres Strait Expedition.
Occasionally a few stones required to be placed
upright, or broken ones put together. […] Usu-
ally little twigs, leaves or tiny plants had to
be removed from the ground or from between
the stones and shells so as not to unnecessarily
complicate the picture. … Very rarely did I turn a
carved stone so as to bring out its carving more
effectively; occasionally I shifted shells a little,
so as to make them show up better, but only
when these had no definite position. Attention
to small details such as these are necessary to
produce intelligible photographs but care must
be exercised not to overdo it or in any way to
modify the object or shrine. (Haddon quoted by
Edwards 1998, 117)
44    VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 35 Number 1 Spring 2019
FIGURE. 4. “In a Piegan Lodge” (E. S. Curtis, The North American Indians, vol. 6, plate 188, 1911). [This figure appears in color in the
online issue.]
Making the subject matter of ethnographic inquiry
manifest through “intelligible” photographs thus
“required” acting on the photographed reality, yet with-
out actually changing it. Haddon never clearly states
how one could modify stones in a shrine without mod-
ifying the shrine itself, but the succession of examples
he provides could be taken to suggest that this sense of
measure, this feel for the extent to which culture could
be elicited without being made up, was precisely what
the ethnographer should come to exhibit while collect-
ing data. This line that anthropologists felt they had to
walk might appear more clearly in contrast with actual
examples of its crossing: when too much was with-
drawn or added to the picture, therefore disconnecting
it from the reality in which it was supposed to remain
grounded. Both pitfalls (adding and withdrawing too
much) can be illustrated through the work of a single
photographer, Edward S. Curtis. Curtis indeed gained his
huge popularity thanks to the way he ethnographically
misrepresented Native Americans—at least according to
anthropologists such as Boas (Joseph 2013, 167–68). By
removing a clock in a Piegan lodge (Figure 4) or by add-
ing fantastic costumes and postures to Oglala men in his
picture of an “Indian War Party,” Curtis “overdoes it.”
He modifies the stones in a way that modifies the shrine
itself, as it were; he makes culture appear too much,
or rather makes too much culture appear; he designs
an imaginary reality instead of bringing forth the near
invisible reality behind the ordinary one. It is not only
the backdrop that is inexistent in Curtis’s pictures, but
most crucially the photographic fourth wall supposed to
separate him as a photographer from the subject of his
photographs. Curtis circulates freely through the frame
of his pictures: while he does not appear in person next
to the Native Americans he portraits, contrary to Boas
and Hunt, for instance, he intervenes far more directly
and consequentially than they do in the composition of
his subjects (Pinney 2011, 92–93).
Meanwhile, considering culture as something akin
to an invisible thing that could be made to appear
through photographs (among other interactional appa-
ratuses) also was at the center of other knowledge
endeavors aspiring to scientific recognition at the time,
namely, “spiritualism” and “psychic sciences.” These
were actually quite different things: they were pro-
moted by different institutions, and they advocated a
rather different epistemological positioning (Oppenheim
1988). However, they broadly shared a common assump-
tion that most things deemed “paranormal” (telekinesis,
thought transference, haunting, and so on) were only
called so because science had not yet found the laws
that governed them—the principles of their normality,
so to speak. It was high time, they said, modern sciences
had the courage to broach this topic and chart this yet
unknown dimension of the world, in order to commen-
surate it with the rest of “nature” (Flammarion 1923).
 More than Corpses, Less than Ghosts  Delaplace   45

FIGURE. 5. Excerpt from a letter to Camille Flammarion. Portrait of Mr. Sweedale and successive enlargements of a detail. Flammarion
Archives, Société Astronomique de France.

Theories actually differed as to the exact defini-
tion of the subject matter of these investigations: was
the invisible principle responsible for paranormal phe-
nomena a “psychic element,” a “fluid” akin to electric-
ity that composed the earth and pervaded the world,
leaving traces after people and events that were only
imperfectly and unequally perceivable by human senses
(Flammarion 1923, 186, 287)? Or rather an energy radi-
ating from the human body, more or less condensed in
the form of an individual principle akin to the Christian
soul, and living in a realm only sometimes intersecting
the one of the living (Desmond 1934)? Important figures
of psychic sciences at the end of the nineteenth and
the beginning of the twentieth century, such as Charles
Richet and Camille Flammarion in France or Hereward
Carrington and Nandor Fodor in England, seemed to
oscillate in their conception of what it was exactly
they were studying. Few among the first-­rate scientists
46    VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 35 Number 1 Spring 2019
dedicated to the study of paranormal phenomena actu-
ally ventured into more than provisional suppositions
on what it was that linked them. Their research, quite
comparably in this respect to the anthropological study
of culture, was less concerned with defining the psy-
chic element than with documenting its manifestations.
And like anthropologists, psychical researchers indeed
expected a lot in this respect from photography.
Several mediums started very early on to perform what
was called “spirit photography” (Tucker 2005, 65–125),
following the much debated premise that invisible psy-
chic manifestations could appear on a negative film, next
to the sitter, after these séances. Pictures were also made
by amateur photographers, eager investigators who, not
unlike the explorers on whom anthropologists relied at
the same period, wanted to contribute to the advancement
of science. These amateur photographers tried to conform
to what they imagined, or were told, was the proper ethic
of scientific research, which often involved acting upon
pictures in order to make the visible phenomena more
“intelligible.” Here (Figure 5) is an example drawn from
the personal archives of Camille Flammarion: this series
of photographs was sent to him by a Mr. Sweedale, Vicar
of Weston, who believed they captured an apparition. The
first picture is a portrait of Mr. Sweedale, and the follow-
ing three show a particular shape in it, blown up, and
made more and more visible through the manipulation of
contrast during development.
Anthropologists were perhaps less willing than
anyone to draw parallels between their use of pho-
tography and that of amateur or professional psychic
researchers. Tylor notoriously held spiritualism in con-
tempt, stating just a few years before Primitive Culture
that “the modern spiritualism, as every ethnographer
may know, is pure and simple savagery both in its the-
ory and the tricks by which it is supported” (quoted by
Stocking 1971, 90). However, his interactions with spir-
itualist circles did not stop there; more accurately, they
started afterward, as he probably did not know much
on this topic at the time he wrote this. In 1872, he spent
a month in London meeting with mediums and attend-
ing séances, carrying out a fully fledged inquiry, which
he recounted in a small unpublished diary revealed by
George Stocking. Although Tylor seemed more taken
than expected by the experience, his opinion did not
really change thereafter (Stocking 1971).
Thus, neither Tylor nor most anthropologists
would see any continuity whatsoever between “cul-
ture” and “ghosts” or “psychic forces” as being equally
invisible things that had to be made visible through
photographic devices, among others (Pels 2003). Pre-
cisely, the way culture had to be made visible on paper,
the way it was supposed to become manifest in the
photographer’s field of vision, should not be the way
ghosts did: the way spiritualists went about using pho-
tography could be seen, like Curtis’s, as another way of
“overdoing it”—of actually “modifying” reality by act-
ing too much on it. What Boas and Haddon were try-
ing to picture was not supposed to appear as an actual
entity beside the visible components of the world; as
a vanishing reality almost palpable (but not quite)
behind ordinary reality, it had to be less patent and
more diffuse. In this respect, and from the standpoint
of the anthropological “good practice,” the exotic pho-
tographs of Edward Curtis and the ghost photographs
of psychic amateur researchers could be seen as being
flawed in the same way; they left the realm of science
through the same door, as it were, in that they did too
much to the visible reality. Perhaps it is not only by
chance then that both kinds of pictures have an air
of resemblance to them—as if the absences in Curtis’s
images produced the same blurry shapes as the pres-
ences in amateur ghost photographs.
Thus, if anthropological photography had to make
culture appear in order to have any scientific interest,
these apparitions could not be as patent, as material—
as visible—as those featured on psychic or spiritualist
pictures. Culture had to be more animated, so to speak,
than just a corpse, and yet less so than an actual ghost.
The actual practice of spiritualism and psychic sciences,
meanwhile, did little to reassess this difference: the scopic
and interactional apparatuses set up in spiritualist circles
made it look like photographing culture and photograph-
ing spirits posed similar challenges. Even more, the tech-
niques they employed were not so far removed from one
another. Here (Figure 6) is, for instance, the picture of a
séance held in 1898 by a famous medium of that time,
Eusapia Palladino, in the presence of Camille Flammar-
ion himself. The picture shows a curtain hanging behind
the medium, which closed off one of the room’s corners.
Several musical instruments were kept behind this cur-
tain, which during the séance would be flying over to the
room, and even occasionally land in the middle of the
table or beside participants. Meanwhile, the table would
levitate: this was actually the central and main mani-
festation as well as the one scientists like Flammarion
were the most eager to test and to potentially debunk.
The camera, set in front of the medium, produced pho-
tographs that were both meant as a test for potential
fraud and as testimonies of the apparition. The room was
indeed rather dark, and while participants felt and heard
lots of things throughout the séance, they would not see
much: it was really through photographs circulated or
published afterward that the manifestation could really
be looked at, as an emanation of the interaction between
all the participants, both visible and invisible.

FIGURE. 6. Séance held by the medium Eusapia Palladino (center) in the presence of Camille Flammarion (on the medium’s left-hand
side), G. de Fontenay, 1897. Flammarion Archives, Societé Astronomique de France. [This figure appears in color in the online issue.]
If only graphically, one could draw a parallel
between this setting and that used by Boas. On Boas’s
picture too, the central figure of the Kwakwaka’wakw
woman channeled culture as a result of her rela-
tions with the people and things in her presence. On
both pictures as well, the backdrop had a particular
enabling role, in that it created a space of interac-
tion within which the manifestation may happen. The
blanket held by Boas and Hunt and the curtain hang-
ing behind Eusapia Palladino were nevertheless two
very different kinds of backdrops, in that they each
allowed for a different interplay between what was
set in front of it and what lay behind. As I tried to
show, the blanket on Boas’s picture allowed for things
to happen in front of it, and it did so by creating a
context partially removed (but not too much) from
the broader context behind it. By contrast, in medi-
umistic séances, the curtain found itself in the middle
of a zone where manifestations occurred: as descrip-
tions of these events make quite clear, the spiritualist
setting worked around the backdrop, rather than in
front of it only. In several occasions, witnesses felt
or saw the curtain bulge, as if pressed from the other
side with a cushion: the backdrop here was not so
much an enclosure as a surface of communication
with a world deemed invisible. By allowing stuff to
come out from behind the curtain, in other words,
the spiritualist setting gave spirits a graspable mate-
More than Corpses, Less than Ghosts  Delaplace   47
riality: using the porous separation between things
hidden (behind the backdrop) and things visible (in
front of it), it produced, as it were, a manifestation of
the invisible.
Conclusion
I have argued in this article that anthropological uses
of photography to capture culture could be better un-
derstood in opposition to two contemporary uses: an-
thropometric photography, on the one hand, and spirit
photography, on the other. While anthropology explic-
itly distinguished itself from the first in trying to get
at more than just bodies depicted as corpses, it distin-
guished itself more implicitly, yet no less forcefully,
from the second, which had all sort of things (too many
things) appear patently (too patently) on its pictures.
The apparatuses developed by anthropologists at the
turn of the century thus encapsulated—or rather capaci-
tated—a particular epistemic virtue: a talent to act upon
reality (but not too much) in order to make an invisible
dimension of it appear on paper.
I also showed that each of these apparatuses—the
anthropometric, the anthropological, and the spiritual-
ist—relied on a particular method of framing the photo-
graph, which is best illustrated by their use of the back-
drop. Through the interplay between the front and the
48    VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 35 Number 1 Spring 2019
rear of the backdrop, each one of them implemented a
particular relationship between things hidden and things
visible. These three backdrops, or these three techniques
of framing a photograph, point to three ways of con-
cealing, which sustain in turn three visual theories: they
are three “invitations to see” derived from three ways of
separating, more or less porously, the subject from the
photograph and their immediate surroundings. What I
tried to show, meanwhile, is that these three methods of
framing, these three ways of hiding, determined three
different relations to the invisible. While anthropometric
photography ensured that nothing else than the visible
body of the sitter would appear, thanks to a perfectly
impervious backdrop, ethnographic and spiritualist
photography produced apparatuses that allowed things
to appear thanks to a subtler and relative interplay
between what was removed from the frame, and what
was brought into view.
Thus, while ghosts are not the same thing as culture,
visual theories of early ethnographers and devout spiri-
tualists suggest that both had a similar way of not being
readily observable. Indeed, neither of them were simply
hidden, as neither of them could be simply uncovered in
order to be brought into view; rather, as things invisi-
ble, they could only be observed under certain circum-
stances, or thanks to the right apparatus—through the
right kind of work. In the examples examined above, it
is the amount of interplay allowed between things hid-
den and things plainly visible, between things removed
from the frame and things left there—the backdrop or
the frame’s level of porosity, as it were—which seems to
directly determine the texture of the invisible appearing
in the picture. In the early attempts to capture “cul-
ture” through photography, it was therefore crucial for
would-­be ethnographers to get their backdrop right: not
too impervious in order for something to appear—for
photographs to actually “teach any thing,” as Haddon
(quoted by Edwards 2016, 106) would have it—yet not
too porous either lest all hell breaks loose and all sorts
of things start showing up on the film.
All in all, one cannot but find it a little bit per-
plexing—yet indeed quite fortunate—that anthropolo-
gists managed at the time to convince their peers of
the existence of “culture,” and of the need to study it
scientifically, while spiritualists failed to do the same
with “ghosts.” This, notwithstanding the fact there
were certainly many more people who had encountered
a “ghost” at the end of the nineteenth century than
people who had encountered “culture”—and not even
mentioning the fact that the manifestation of the for-
mer is probably rather more striking than that of the
latter. To justify this by claiming that “culture” is real
and “ghosts” are not is probably to mistake causes for
consequences: it is indeed because anthropology won
the academic battle, and psychic sciences lost it, that an
anthropology of ghosts still appears a sounder project
than a hauntology of culture.
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