Volume II

Spirit Photography

The plate was honest. Everything in front of it was not.

Volume II is the photographic volume: double exposures, extras, cloud faces, ectoplasmic drapery, and the long documented history of fraud that surrounds all of them. The Entities here are recovered from the accident of the medium rather than the intention of the sitter. The second face that arrived uninvited on a wedding portrait, the figure standing behind a chair nobody had occupied. The archive takes no position on what caused an image. It records what the image contains, and who made it.

Records 0102 to 0202. Every record in this volume carries an explicit fraud note where the historical literature documents one. Suppressing that would make the archive a believer rather than a keeper.

3 recovered of 101

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A studio portrait of a seated sitter, over which a second translucent head and shoulders is superimposed at the upper left, lit from a different direction than the sitter.

ENTITY 0102Silver

The Extra

Photographic Extra

A pale mass of cloth emerging from the lower face of a seated woman in a darkened room, photographed with a magnesium flash that has burned out its highlights.

ENTITY 0131Bone

The Drapery

Emanation

A photograph of a heavy cloud bank in which the shadows resolve, at a distance, into a broad human face turned three-quarters away from the camera.

ENTITY 0177Silver

The Cloud Face

Atmospheric Face