What Spirit Photography can tell us about the Science behind Spiritualism and the Act of Mourning
[Unidentified elderly woman seated, three “spirits” in the background]; William H. Mumler (American, 1832 – 1884); 1862–1875; Albumen silver print; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
In the fall of 2019, during my Fulbright Fellowship in Chile, which coincided with a social revolution that continues to reverberate across Chilean society, a large graffiti-mural caught my attention along a wall in downtown Santiago: “Tu normalidad es privilegio!”
Photograph by Eric Zolov
Giovanni Boccaccio wrote the Decameron in the mid-fourteenth century as a collection of stories that detail experiences of Florentines during an outbreak of the Black Death. He relayed these stories within the narrative framework of a party of young women and men, known as the brigata, who told the stories to each other after fleeing to the countryside to avoid the plague. The women narrators of the brigata outnumber the men seven to three. The brigata are depicted in the John William Waterhouse painting, A Tale From the Decameron, painted over 400 years after Boccaccio wrote the Decameron.
BONNIE: Welcome, you’re listening to an episode of the Crisis and Catharsis podcast, where we explore stories of how people have found relief in times of crisis, focusing on artistic expression, like literature, music and art, but also expression in daily life, like cuisine and oral histories. This episode focuses on Hollywood and the use of movies to get the United States to enter World War II, but how they also functioned as mass entertainment in a precarious period for many Americans. My name is Bonnie Soper, I’m a PhD student at Stony Brook University who studies religious and political dissidence in early modern Scotland. Today I will be asking questions and interviewing Devin Kelly. Devin has a masters degree in public history from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and currently works in Collections at the Cape Fear Museum of History and Science.
Keep listening if you want to learn more about war propaganda and the changing nature of women and citizenship during the 1940s …
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