project47

“The democratization of photography, like that of the Bible during the  Protestant Reformation,” he explains, “implied a loss of an  authoritative interpretation and manipulation by an elite.” Without the  mediating role of art and the institutions that governed its aesthetic  claims, or religion and the institutions that governed its spiritual  claims, spirit photography came to mean many different things to many different people.

Spirit, like beauty, faced a gross inflationary pressure or a loss in value as the sheer number of spirit images and spirit image-makers multiplied many fold. As a result, photography’s effect on the idea of spirit would be like capitalism’s more broadly on Christianity. Instead of seeing spirit anew, Harvey tells us, “the image of the spirit proliferated and disintegrated,” no doubt contributing, it might be added, to our late modern inability to see spirit at all. (Photography and Spirit, 144) http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/index3207.html