Photogarphy of the paranormal.

• Position: Focus on the Occult - "The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

GHOST, SEANCES, levitation, auras, ectoplasm ... extraordinary photographs of these and other paranormal phenomena are on display in an exhibition devoted to the historical intersections between photography and the once wildly popular interest in spiritualism.

"The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult" brings together some 120 pnotographs culled from public and private archives throughout Europe and North America focusing primarily on the period from the 1860s through World War II, when occult and paranormal phenomena were a hot topic of debate and both supporters and skeptics summoned photographs as evidence. Approaching the material from a historical perspective, "Medium" presents the photographs on their own terms, without authoritative Comment as to their veracity.

The Spiritualist Movement, which began in the 1850s, was founded on the belief that the human spirit exists beyond the body and that the spirits of the dead can--and do--communicate with the living. The first photographer to produce and market spirit photographs was William H. Mumler, who opened a studio in Boston in the early 1860s, where he photographed clients accompanied by ghostly images of deceased friends and relatives. Mumler perhaps is best known lot his portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln, who appears with the spirit of her martyred husband, Pres. Abraham Lincoln, hovering just behind her, hands reassuringly on her shoulder.

Included in the exhibition will be Mumler's portrait of Fanny Conant, a well-known Boston medium, who appears in the photograph with her control spirit, Vashti. Vashti was said to be the daughter of an Indian chief who was slain, along with her father, in the Yellowstone Massacre of 1861. During and after the Civil War, the apparitions of Native Americans often appeared in photographs or were called on at seances, as many spiritualists regarded them as figures of reconciliation and forgiveness.

As the Spiritualist movement gained momentum in the late 19th century, spirit photography became a hotly debated topic, attracting the attention of major intellectual figures, including psychologist William James, scientists Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Richet, and author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the latter best known for his tales of Sherlock Holmes.

"The Perfect Medium" is organized in three sections, emphasizing the different roles photography has played in its encounters with the occult. The first section is devoted to photographs of ghosts or...