ghost

 

My favorite feature in my very amateur practice of Photoshop is the opacity adjustment, as is clear from this photo. To create the image, I used an archived photo of a dress on a mannequin, a color photo of a hotel hallway, and a photo of a glowing blue light.
With this image, I was thinking back to Jaimie Baron’s discussion of conspiracy theorists surrounding the moon landing and other apparently truthful historical documents. She begins this discussion by posing it as an issue of archival authority writing, “At issue is the question of who decides the ‘legitimate’ meaning of the document, which involves the issue of historical authority, of who has the right to evaluate a given appropriation and the version of history it serves” (63).  She then goes on to affirm that a “critical attitude” can be useful when the search for the verity of found films leads to extratextual verification of the found footage’s narrative. However, her attitude is much different when dealing with conspiracy theorist’s desire to prove an image or images wrong in what she calls “finding out,” which she does not seem to find very agreeable.

What I find problematic about this approach is that the verification of the text is found through the extratextual evidence, rather than what is found within the text. For, if the extratextual consists of sources from places that most researchers would use, it most likely bears the accepted historical narrative that affirms the found text in question, thus leaving a “critical attitude” as falling short of the necessary questioning needed to give authority to a historical document and its narrative.

Instead, “finding out,” which consists of locating “minor details within the image which are then used to discredit the document’s documentary status and/or its established historical meaning” (63) focuses on the text’s affirmation of its narrative within itself. While those that Jaimie refers to in this definition are set on disproving the validity of the document at hand, I do think they’re on a much stronger path with which to grant documents historical authority.

While the image I’ve created is representative of a paranormal narrative that many people—and the popular narrative, at least to the extreme I’ve presented—do not put stock in, imagine that the ghostly presence of headless 17th century women was commonplace. Then, you are shown this image and understand it to be a found or historically accurate photo because your critical attitude and the extratextual sources that it has led you to all agree that the occurrence is frequent, true, and photographable. This, unfortunately, does not take you far enough to notice the few missed pixels of the layered dresses that are floating above the left shoulder, or the irregularities in the lighting, etc. that a questioning technique like “finding out” where the text must prove its own validity would. In essence, I am a proponent of the text proving itself first and foremost, and then creating the historical narrative from there, rather than the historical narrative being created, then serving to verify the truthfulness of the archived image. (Please note, though, that my experience in how well somebody can Photoshop a picture is seriously lacking. So, if an entirely perfect and false image can, indeed, be made with no remnants of its falseness, it problematizes my argument.)

With this photo and my little know-how, I was also trying to create movement in the skirt of the dress (a back-and-forth swaying) through the layering of duplicated skirts. As I’m sure that pros can more accurately represent movement in a photo, I’m interested in that idea and what implications it may bear on digital/archival ideas that we’ve talked about, but I’m just not sure where to go with the thought, so if anybody has any directions, please throw them out!