There is No Home

What does it mean to haunt a home?

In the late 19th century, men began to use photography to document the immaterial. Until this point, photography had been seen as an arbiter of truth – a device used by men of science to document and reproduce things as they existed in reality. These photographs of spirits and apparitions became a contentious point, beginning a debate around photography of proof, truth, and lies.

This period of history also saw the sharpening of the divide between men and women’s roles in society. The patriarchal ideology that women belonged in a domestic sphere (separate from men’s public sphere) is not unique to the Victorians, but became further idealized in the wake of the industrial revolution. This is where we enter into the spiritualist movement. Because of belief in the concept of biological determinism, women were seen as “closer to heaven” than men. This allowed women prominent roles within the spiritualist movement as mediums, allowing them a doorway into the public sphere. Women’s involvement in spirit photographs was that of the medium – a theatrical role meant for the satisfaction (and furthering the belief) of the sitter, and typically involving the medium creating a spectacle of laying her hands on the camera before the photograph was taken.

In this project, titled There Is No Home, I return to the theatrics of 19th century spectral photography as both the photographer and the photographed. The loss of identity when faced with domestic isolation and/or a haunting (or, in some cases, becoming the haunting) is a common theme within many haunted house narratives. In exploring what it means to haunt a home, I am creating photographic evidence of my own haunting. Using references to the history of female hysteria through the use of historical artifacts of domestic danger (e.g. arsenic wallpaper), I’m looking for danger within the comfort, and comfort within the danger.