With today's technology, it is difficult to take the dwarf to anyone in terms of image.We have all seen those videos or those "fake" photographs that run so often on social networks.Appearances, shadows, spectra...manipulations are common and our eyes, have enough filming to be deceived by the trick.
But let's get in context.19th century, the world of photography was already showing new and unknown techniques, and people, in a post-war context, needed to hold on to anything to remember their own again.To contact those people that the fatality and horrors of war had taken to that other “almost” always inaccessible world for the living.
William H.Mumler and his ghostly photography business
The American Civil War had come to an end, with the horrible consequences that every confrontation always entails in a country of its own.Neighbors against neighbors, brothers against brothers.People of different aspirations but rooted in the same land, in the same blood.
There had been many casualties and dismembered families trying hard to go to ahead, moving forward in a changing world that would soon ignite the engines of progress towards an unstoppable future in the American nation. William H.Mumler, for his part, was one of those visionaries who sought to get a good slice of that context of mourning, of reconstruction and of course, of opportunities.
I had a booming business. Photography .But I also saw that there was a new field that I was finding every time more and more adepts, it was like not, spiritualism.
This was a pseudoscience that was gathering under its bosom layers of society of all you and each one of the strata.From the poorest to the richest, all eager to get in touch with their dead, with those who war, had taken early, without allowing goodbye, an appropriate farewell with which to make the days easier.
It was therefore strange that in any city in the US there was no medium settled in a populous street, with its striking local looking the sensitivity and attention of potential customers.But it is said that among all those fakers (and those who were not so much), there was one whose business stood out from the rest.A very special one: for its sophistication, for its elegance and effectiveness So real it took your breath away.
We are speaking of course of Mr.William H.Mumler, who created a photographic service from 1860 where he portrays ba neither more nor less, than to people accompanied by 'their ghosts'. Of those people who were in the hereafter and who suddenly appeared under the lens of Mr.Humler's cameras.All a claim , without a doubt.
Those were the days when photography was advancing with firm and safe feet.Mumler, a jeweler by profession, had become fond of this art and wanted to try his luck but contribute something special.a good back room in his place and, in 1861, he appeared in front of his friends to teach them something surprising: a self-portrait that he had made, and where without knowing how, the form of a young woman appeared: his own newly deceased cousin.
Such photography caused excitement throughout Boston, so much so that dozens of customers in his business soon appeared, willing that the ghost photographer would do the same with them.I would give you back for a moment the image of your beloved people of beyond.
William H.Mumler saw his opportunity, and I do not hesitate to charge these photographs at a price five times higher than the ordinary one.And nobody object a word.The result was more How tempting.
His business was a success.He got rich and there were many people who were amazed at his business taking his self-portrait accompanied by a strange shadow, a shadow that most identified with that of a relative. Faith was absolute.
The uncovering of the scam
But those who did not have faith in Mr.Mumler were his professional colleagues, who did not take long to find out how he achieved this effect in his photographs, or so they believed.They suspected that what he did was apply the photo with a same plaque in which there were still residues of the previous one.That, plus a refined technique of revelation, towards authentic miracles.
They took him to trial, by fake.And what happened? That there was not enough evidence.Not at all.Mumler then changed cities and continued to work non-stop echoing his ability to photograph ghosts.In 1868 he opened a second studio, this time in the city of New York .All a success.
So much was the fame that was brought back to trial, being the newspaper New York Sun who along with the prosecution, tried to gather evidence to prove his scam.But you will be surprised to learn that they did not get anything.Absolutely nothing.After a few weeks of testimony and arguments, the judge had to withdraw the charges against Mumler.
That touched his business a little.pay a high cost for their lawyers and, for a while, their business under a little.But something happened one day...A woman appeared at the door of her business that would change her life.
She was a woman who asked for discretion, and who, knowing her skills, only asked her to take a picture.It was the year of 1871, and to whom Mumler photo was neither more nor less than to Mary Todd Lincoln , the widow of US President Abraham Lincoln.
No one knew how she did that.No person could ever unmask him.Especially when I can offer him to the widow of Lincoln, that photograph in which, indeed, she went out with her dead husband six years before.
Fascinating but...Do you think it is licit to take advantage of the feelings of these people?
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