Photographing the Invisible: Immortal Spirit Photography and China's En(light)enment

Abstract

This article examines Chinese spirit photography practiced by a spiritualist (lingxue 靈學) group during China's enlightenment movement in the late 1910s. Integrating the trope of photography with Daoist divinatory rituals (fuji 扶乩), lingxue scholars claimed to have finally “photographed” immortal spirits but used shadow to render their spectral likeness. Situating this conception of photography in the Daoist practice of visualizing the formless and the true, this article asks: what is the implication of marrying the ancient search for the invisible with an obsession with the empirically real? This article argues that Chinese spirit photography was not simply superstition nor a local appropriation of modern visual technology. Rather, it offers a provocative take on the nature of photographic likeness and encapsulates a turn-of-the-century, visual-epistemic shift in the relationship between seeing and imaging. This case study encourages the exploration of the conceptual potential of the Chinese designation of photography, sheying 攝影, not as “writing with light” but as “capturing shadows.”