This press photograph shows the medium Charles Victor Miller with the white figure called the “Ghost of Little Lulu,” beneath a banner welcoming “our Spirit Friends.” The print bears a Branger agency stamp and a manuscript title on the reverse. Its exact date and the photographer’s identity remain unestablished.
Miller dealt in old pictures and Japanese art in San Francisco. In the séance room he sat inside a curtained cabinet while white figures appeared before his audience. He visited Europe in 1906 and again attracted attention in Paris in 1908. The French occultist Papus and the spiritualist writer Gabriel Delanne found his performances convincing. Other investigators were less persuaded. César de Vesme suspected that the smaller phantoms were drapery manipulated by the medium; the physiologist Charles Richet called Miller “an evident fraud.”
The disagreement belongs to the history of this kind of image. A photograph could preserve an apparition for viewers who had never entered the séance room, while leaving the method of its production unresolved. Miller’s pictured companion remains a white figure under a welcoming banner; the print cannot tell us how she arrived there.
Maurice-Louis Branger ran a Paris press agency that covered public events of many kinds. The stamp on this print connects it with that trade in news images. It may record distribution through the agency rather than a photograph taken by Branger himself. The physical evidence on the reverse is therefore as important as the supposed spirit on the front.
BRANGER, Maurice-Louis (press agency). [Charles Victor Miller and the “Ghost of Little Lulu.”] Vintage silver gelatin print. Paris: M. Branger, 5 rue Cambon, [c. 1908].
Physical Description: Silver gelatin print, approximately 6 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches, unmounted. On the verso, a manuscript title in pencil, “Miller the medium and the ghost of Little Lulu,” written over Branger’s faint copyright hand stamp with his rue Cambon address; a violet stamp, “Copyrighted Brown Brothers”; and pencil file notations, “File 43,” “13062” and “AE4-349.”
Condition: Two creases at the lower left corner, the larger with small cracks in the surface. Scattered brown spotting on the verso, mostly toward the right edge, not visible on the image side. A few small white specks in the image.
Provenance: Stamps of two press agencies on the verso: Maurice-Louis Branger in Paris, and Brown Brothers, the New York photo agency founded in 1904. The pencil file numbers are typical of a working press archive.
This press photograph shows the medium Charles Victor Miller with the white figure called the “Ghost of Little Lulu,” beneath a banner welcoming “our Spirit Friends.” The print bears a Branger agency stamp and a manuscript title on the reverse. Its exact date and the photographer’s identity remain unestablished.
Miller dealt in old pictures and Japanese art in San Francisco. In the séance room he sat inside a curtained cabinet while white figures appeared before his audience. He visited Europe in 1906 and again attracted attention in Paris in 1908. The French occultist Papus and the spiritualist writer Gabriel Delanne found his performances convincing. Other investigators were less persuaded. César de Vesme suspected that the smaller phantoms were drapery manipulated by the medium; the physiologist Charles Richet called Miller “an evident fraud.”
The disagreement belongs to the history of this kind of image. A photograph could preserve an apparition for viewers who had never entered the séance room, while leaving the method of its production unresolved. Miller’s pictured companion remains a white figure under a welcoming banner; the print cannot tell us how she arrived there.
Maurice-Louis Branger ran a Paris press agency that covered public events of many kinds. The stamp on this print connects it with that trade in news images. It may record distribution through the agency rather than a photograph taken by Branger himself. The physical evidence on the reverse is therefore as important as the supposed spirit on the front.
BRANGER, Maurice-Louis (press agency). [Charles Victor Miller and the “Ghost of Little Lulu.”] Vintage silver gelatin print. Paris: M. Branger, 5 rue Cambon, [c. 1908].
Physical Description: Silver gelatin print, approximately 6 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches, unmounted. On the verso, a manuscript title in pencil, “Miller the medium and the ghost of Little Lulu,” written over Branger’s faint copyright hand stamp with his rue Cambon address; a violet stamp, “Copyrighted Brown Brothers”; and pencil file notations, “File 43,” “13062” and “AE4-349.”
Condition: Two creases at the lower left corner, the larger with small cracks in the surface. Scattered brown spotting on the verso, mostly toward the right edge, not visible on the image side. A few small white specks in the image.
Provenance: Stamps of two press agencies on the verso: Maurice-Louis Branger in Paris, and Brown Brothers, the New York photo agency founded in 1904. The pencil file numbers are typical of a working press archive.
