Spirit Photography vs Staged Photography
心霊写真 / 演出写真
Both sit in Photographic Genres, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. One is style and the other technique. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Spirit Photography
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The 19th-century trade in ghosts produced by double exposure. From Mumler's portrait of Lincoln's widow to the séance boom, it fed on the very belief that a photograph proves something, a style built from media deception and desire.
Staged Photography
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Composes scene, figure, props and light before the shutter, shaking the very premise that photographs record reality.
| Spirit Photography | Staged Photography | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1862–1930s | 19th century– / 1970s revival |
| Family | Photographic Genres | Photographic Genres |
| Kind | Style | Technique |
| Cues | Translucent superimposed figures / Composites with mourning portraits / The séance-record format / Staged evidentiality | Constructed scenes / Props / Cinematic lighting / Deliberate artificiality |
| Best used for | Horror and ghost story promotion that borrows the look of a genuine record · Exhibits and teaching material about how much a photograph proves | Restaging the conventions of advertising or news images to cast doubt on them · Building a story into one frame meant for exhibition, not for record |
| Type | Add a handwritten date and a testimony like line in printed form | Make the text in the frame as a prop rather than borrowing a typeface |
| Composition | A frontal portrait of the living with the figure half over the shoulder | Fix gaze and hand positions in advance and block the frame like a painting |
| Material | Double expose at low density and blur the edge until it vanishes | Built sets or models, cinematic lighting, large format shot and printed big |
| Caution | The ghost gets rendered sharp and finished as artwork, which destroys the one condition the style needs, that a believer could read it as accident. | Staging that only imitates a natural record leaves the assumption that photographs record reality untouched, and the whole reason for constructing the scene disappears. |