Art

Since its invention, photography has had the ability to manipulate as well as manifest our view of the world around us, never more so than in the realms of the unreal. Faked photos of flying saucers, Loch Ness monsters, hairy yetis and Edwardian fairies are as important to the medium’s history as the capturing of a beautiful landscape. The Photographers’ Gallery’s ‘Seeing is Believing’ explores photography’s relationship to the spooky and the supernatural, in work by seven contemporary artists and a suite of older images from the the Harry Price Library of Magical Literature.
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Britain’s best-known ghost investigator Price set up the National Laboratory of Psychical Research in 1925. He wanted to sort out the supernatural charlatans from the genuine psychics and photography played a vital role. In most of the images it’s hard to believe how any of the supernatural manifestations – females with mouths full of rolled-up cheesecloth purporting to be ectoplasm and sheet-like spooks dangling from suspended coat hangers among them – could have convinced anyone. But as historical documents of the pipe-smoking doctor and his activities they’re fascinating, not least in what the titles reveal: ‘DC Russell, amateur firewalker, after having his burns dressed’, almost says it all.

Despite the rich subject matter and creative potential of photography today, work by some of the contemporary artists seems slight by comparison. Surrounding her subjects with a fuzzy grey mist Clare Strand’s large-scale black-and-white ‘aura’ portraits of young people emit a feeling of depressive emptiness rather than energy. Tim Maul’s panel of 12 images highlighting hallways, doorways and windows in New York where psychic activity has been detected creates more of an atmosphere but is still too obvious an idea. More interesting and affecting is Susan MacWilliam’s video ‘Explaining Magic to Mercer’. On screen, the five-year-old boy Mercer is seen drawing at a table, while asking questions to the unseen artist about the special powers of subjects featured in her own artworks, including Mollie Fancher’s multiple personalities and the fingertip vision of Rosa Kuleshova. The occult subject matter and the shadowy presence of the artist somehow gives Mercer an unsettling authority.

The child’s uncanny resemblance to Damien from ‘The Omen’ movie doesn’t go unnoticed. At David Risley’s gallery, in Jonathan Allen’s exhibition about the German magician Helmut Schreiber, it’s not the supposedly psychic photographic imagery of hauntings that we’re asked to believe, but the notion that photographs and other objects have their own power to haunt. Born in 1903, Schreiber (stage name Kalanag) was a German magician and president of the German Magic Circle in the lead up to World War II. From the late 1940s to the early ’60s Kalanag toured the world with a successful magic and music spectacular. During the war however, Kalanag was closely associated with the upper echelons of the Nazi party including Goebbels, Göring and Hitler himself, details of which the showman was obviously keen to conceal, just as the magic community tried to disassociate itself from him. Allen’s exploration of the subject considers not only the power of photographic imagery, but also the problematic power of association.

A wall of framed photos shows Kalanag in various publicity and performance shots from throughout his career; levitating a lady on stage, posing in cowboy hat and cigar or as the great white hunter with Simbo the performing cheetah (apparently a gift from Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie). In grainy archive footage, Kalanag is also seen performing for a seated Führer – for once not the main focus of attention – whose gaze, along with that of the audience around him, is directed towards the magician. It’s a contentious image, not only among the magic community – still conflicted between the distaste for Kalanag’s Nazi associations and acknowledgement of his achievements as a magician – but also for the obvious parallels between a magician’s power to enchant and a charismatic political leader or dictator’s ability to command and hold an audience. Accompanying the photographs Allen displays a vitrine containing a plain earthenware jar sat on its metal carrying case. The jar – a ‘lota vase’ – is an original Kalanag prop, used by the magician to provide a seemingly inexhaustible supply of water in his illusion ‘Waters from India’. Allen has added another layer of association to the story by reprinting the photos in the show in water that has passed through Kalanag’s vase – resulting in the images themselves being tainted by something that has touched their own past.

As an exhibition this is a rather brusque display and it’s a shame that the planned performance (the artist is himself a magician) couldn’t be funded for this show. Then again, perhaps minimal is appropriate. Seeing may be believing, but as with all illusions it’s not so much what’s there, but about the power to suggest what might be there.

‘Seeing is Believing’ continues at the Photographers’ Gallery until Jan 27. Jonathan Allen shows at David Risley until Jan 6.