Special Exhibition Review: The Perfect Medium

Cue up the eerie Halloween music, because Stan Parchin, Senior Correspondent for Museums and Special Exhibitions, has just reviewed The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (on view from September 27 through December 31, 2005 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art). I particularly enjoyed reading about how and why this ... genre? ... of Spiritualist photography became popular, way back when. Any Year 2005 7-year-old with access to Photoshop could probably superimpose Death embracing any old body in any old JPEG he or she chose to manipulate. But that's now. Double-exposing Death in the (definitely pre-Photoshop) 1860s was cutting-edge technology. Viewed in this historical context, it's easy to see why these images captured such a wide audience when they first appeared. Thanks very much for the timely - and rather seasonally creepy - review Stan!