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Photographic phenomena differ from practically all others studied by psychical researchers in being, so to…

Date of account
Published 1923
Source
The Case Against Spirit Photographs
Reference
The Case Against Spirit Photographs · selected passage 1
Rights
public_domain
Language
English
Record updated
2026-08-24

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Record summary

Photographic phenomena differ from practically all others studied by psychical researchers in being, so to speak, permanently objective

Published source text

Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.

Source passage

Source text · mention only

Photographic phenomena differ from practically all others studied by psychical researchers in being, so to speak, permanently objective. If one could be sure that the results obtained were not due to trickery one would be in a far better position as regards the problems of their origin and so forth than one is in the case of other types of “physical” phenomena. One could collect spirit photographs, compare them with one another, correlate their differences with the varying conditions of their production, and generally study them at leisure--a procedure which is not possible with table-levitations, materialisations, or direct-voice phenomena.[1] The photographic plate would, in fact, be the most powerful of all weapons of research if only we could eliminate all possibility of fraud.

Historical context

Contextual commentary · mention only

This source supplies historical scientific, skeptical or conventional context. Its terminology and conclusions may not reflect current scholarship.

Modern context

Contextual commentary · mention only

Lattice uses this as an alternative-explanation source, not as an automatic dismissal of testimony. Claims still need to be compared with the actual evidence and current knowledge.

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