[Marguerite Buttinger]

Henri Mathouillot Archive|Unknown|Henri Mathouillot

ca. 1920 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

The understanding of photography as a medium with its own special properties developed simultaneously with another historical conception of the word "medium," referring to a participant in Spiritualist practices who performs as interlocutor between the physical and the spiritual worlds. Using the simple trick of double exposure, photographers were able to exploit the camera’s dispassionate record of reality to uncanny ends, as in this portrait of the medium Marguerite Beuttinger captured in the process of "partial dematerialization." Women, who formed a major contingent of these mystical agents, wielded a power in Spiritualist circles that often transgressed the everyday norms of gender and class. Just as the technique of multiple exposure facilitated experimental form in modernist photographs and lent entertainment value to amateur ones, it also afforded occultists a potent visual metaphor for their belief in the existence of the paranormal in everyday reality—a view concisely expressed in Beuttinger’s twinned presence in the photograph.

Artist

Henri Mathouillot Archive|Unknown|Henri Mathouillot

Date

ca. 1920

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005