How Mr. Eastman Changed the Face of American Religion

In 1900, Kodak released “The Brownie” camera, which opened picture-taking to a wide array of people from various socioeconomic statuses, ethnicities, and regions. Lindsey notes that with this change, photographs shifted from individual acts of beholding to objects that contained narrative cues. The introduction of ambiguity also arose: photographs didn’t just authorize identity, but confuse it. Finally, the Brownie changed American religion by extending the communion of shadows into previously uncaptured and more daily religious activities: missionaries could capture and document their experiences abroad; families recorded baptisms and holidays; and individuals captured the saints and ghosts they encountered in their daily lives.

When I Awake with Thy Likeness

This chapter examines family Bible portrait galleries within the context of studio portraiture and nineteenth-century notions of “likeness.” Portrait galleries for small, card-sized “carte de visite” studio portraits became popular additions to family bibles in the 1860s and remained so through the end of the century. This chapter positions these galleries against standalone photograph albums and other forms of memory work within family bibles in order to consider what genealogies these silent likenesses created for their beholders. As a point of entry into the communion of shadows, this chapter argues that family bible portrait galleries were sites where knotted threads of race and nation were smuggled into sacred history—unwittingly, perhaps—under the guise of family pictures.

Here Is My Name When I Am Dead

This chapter explores death and mourning pictures within a shifting memorial culture that was rooted in historical modes of representation and theologies of redemption. Over the course of the nineteenth century, photographic portraiture emerged within this memorial culture as both the preferred iconography of mourning in nineteenth-century America and, significantly, as a relic of the departed that disclosed future glory to the bereaved. In this chapter, I explore the role of photographs as relics that illuminated the communion of shadows by mediating the body of the deceased with the grieving body of the bereaved. Here, photographs were devised not as tokens of the moldering body of the deceased but of promise of celestial reunion in glory. As memorial portraiture focused attention on the body of the deceased, another facet within the communion of shadows purported to provide evidence of the soul’s survival after death.

Agents of a Fuller Revelation

Intense debates around spirit photography started immediately upon its discovery in late 1862. This chapter frames these debates around the career, trial, and demise of America’s first and most notorious spirit photographer, William Howard Mumler. In the context of the American Civil War, Mumler claimed to have discovered a gift for photographing spirits of departed souls and immediately became the subject of public interest and scrutiny. His uneasy affiliation with modern Spiritualism, his public ridicule by the photographic guild, and his brief celebrity in the 1860s provide a window into the at times intense uncertainty around the camera’s ability to reveal spiritual truth to modern beholders. His hearing before the New York Police Court in the spring of 1869, in particular, facilitated a very public debate around the authority of the Bible and the camera in newspaper accounts that were circulated throughout the country. In this chapter, spirit photographs emerge as a hinge between corporeal referents in studio portraiture, on the one hand, and practices of biblical beholding, on the other, that asked beholders to see what was really there.

A New Testament

A Communion of Shadows begins with the story of Private Walter Jones of the 8th New York Calvary, who came to see his Civil War portrait as much more than a photograph: after it saved his life twice, he called it “a Testament.” Lindsey argues that Jones’s reverence for his portrait was not unique; rather, with the emergence of photography, nineteenth-century American religion developed a new, sacred symbolism rooted in materiality. That is, photographs became more than a physical representation of events as they drew on the memory and values of those who beheld them—thereby transforming the meaning of photography for the study of religion.

Beyond the Sense Horizon

This chapter explores the communion of shadows through the optical marvel of the stereoscope. First developed in the decades before the invention of photography, stereographs began as simple drawings designed to explore binocular vision by simulating dimensional depth on a flat surface. With the invention of the daguerreotype and subsequent print photography, stereographs became immensely popular forms of nineteenth-century visual culture. The effect of dimension was accomplished by positioning two nearly exact photographs side by side and viewed through prismatic lenses fitted into a hood, a contraption known as a stereoscope. Like halftone tours and biblical photographs, stereographs of the Holy Land invited beholders to dismiss the photographic contemporary in their sights on a biblical imaginary. But through the visual sensation of the stereoscope, beholders imagined themselves transported into the biblical past in a way other photographic technologies had not enabled.

By Pencil and Camera

This chapter spirals out from one commissioned photographic tour of Palestine in 1894 to consider the broader framework of halftone photography as a mechanism of ethnographic display and imperial regimes. The chapter follows a set of negatives made by the St. Louis photographer Robert Edward Mather Bain in 1894 from their original publication as part of a commercialized art-folio into the pages of the Bible. Here, the communion of shadows cast living inhabitants of Palestine—Bain’s photographic contemporaries—as relics of a biblical imaginary that affirmed American beholders’ confidence in the power of the camera to capture on glass the Holy Land of the Bible.