My great-great-grandfather had his picture taken around 1865. A dynamic pose. The conquering Van Dyke goatee. The well-accessorised 3 piece suit. Squared jaw. His pale eyes are looking straight at you. He is ready to tell. But then.. His left pupil is precisely, delicately, pierced with a needle. And so are the eyes on other family pictures of the era. Is there more to this picture than meets the eye?
I conjured back a lifelong memory of hushed stories, anecdotes and rumours, consulted Wikipedia, mobilised Reddit, to find that the photographer himself was a controversial spiritist figure.
This picture can take pride of place in the Family Gothic.
Look at the backplate of the picture. This is the historical photographer’s advertisement. A name, an address: Buguet, Dijon. I typed it without much hope into a search engine, and a wall of references popped up. In French naturally, but also in English, American, in articles, in theses. Enough stories, information, events to sharpen the intriguing context around the picture.
Édouard Buguet was the French Spirit Photographer, established in 1865 in Dijon – like the matriarchal branch of my family. Buguet was specialised in spirit photography, a branch of spiritism claiming to fix on film the dead spirits swirling around you. Have a picture taken, and you may even recognise who is peeping over your shoulder! A creepy, macabre entertainment to us, but a fascinating window into the Afterlife for the mid-19th century public. Spirit photography was an extremely popular part of spiritism, which, in itself, is the belief that there is only a thin veil between the world of the dead and the living that can be bridged. The necessary psychic power could be raised in séances, through Ouija board, or other esoteric instruments. Or it could be harnessed in the 19th through the latest discoveries, electricity, magnetism, or photography.
Spiritism was weaved into the French society. My grandmother told me that much herself. Séance is a French word, and France in the 19th century was at its centre. We can still hear it in English today: “how mesmerising is that”?
It is also true that spiritism came with its litany of scams. Buguet himself ended up in jail in 1875. A bit a lot of chemical trickery went into reliably showing spirits on each photo. But what of it? Buguet’s photos made quite the impression on both sides of the Atlantic, and spiritism, sometimes called confusingly spiritualism, was too much of a global phenomenon. 10% of the US population was actively involved in it in the 1850s. Spiritism was both belief and parlour games. A wistful longing for the irrational in an ever more rational industrial world, and a social entertainment before TV evenings. To this day, how many “Most Haunted” TV shows rely on the same “ghosts on camera” shtick?
But, however tantalising this backstory is, it does not explain the pierced eyes on the pictures; it is just not part of the spiritist practises. So what else could it mean?
Photographs in themselves always kept a superstitious aura. After all, how much of our mortal, and immortal, essence gets transferred into the photo? Like the picture of Dorian Gray, do they absorb some part of our life? And so, in this context, piercing the eyes could either be a defence of the soul in the picture – to avoid it being sucked out – or on the contrary a defence against the picture stealing yours. As a last resort, we can only go through the repertoire of superstitions transmitted to me down the aeons. The cursing Evil Eye, or the protective Eye of Horus, both have universal reach. Or the pierced eyes could only be the idle boredom of a child. After all, in 150 years, a lot can happen.
But, to me, ultimately, the pose, the pierced eyes, the choice of photographer, or all three, or none of it, confirm an ancient interest of my family in the supernatural world.
Superstition to my grandmother was well worth using. A prayer to Saint Antoine of Padua, whenever you misplace something. Or needles found on the ground, which you have to stick in your lapel to ground bad luck. And séances. No contradiction there with a deep practising Catholicism. On the contrary, it sort of complemented it, making it more directly graspable – like voodoo does to Christianity.
Centuries of deep rural France white magic, witch doctors and beliefs. Vital tradition to pass on, teach. A failsafe.
And so, we did not have Halloween or watch horror movies at home. That was unseemly. But we did have the spooky tales of my grandmother, always eager to share creepy stories of her own grandparents. That would be the ones in the pictures I found then. Ancestors in top hats and crinolines carrying out secret séances. Or of the great-great-grand female covens, tarot, palm reading etc… And that, they were apparently very good at it. Thrilling.
A grand tale, with now photographs to underpin it.
I do not see dead people. I see soulmates.
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