'I have seen my death!' X-Rays and the Occult

The question of whether a camera could capture spirits is almost as old as photography itself. After the glass-plate negatives of the 1850s enabled the creation of ghost-like double exposures, unscrupulous photographers such as the Boston-born William H. Mumler exploited grieving relatives during the American Civil War, while seventy years later Arthur Conan Doyle would publish his 1922 apologetic The Case for Spirit Photography in the aftermath of another catastrophic conflict. But the X-ray went still further, permitting viewers to see death in the midst of life, the skull beneath the skin, a memento mori given a glowing green patina of modernity. A cartoon in a February 1896 issue of Life magazine, published two months after Röntgen’s image of his wife’s hand had made headlines around the world, depicts a farmer posing with his tools while a photographer takes his portrait; seen through the lens of ‘The New Roentgen Photography’, the smiling dungaree-clad farmer is transformed into a scythe-wielding Grim Reaper. If an ordinary photograph, in the words of photography pioneer Henry Fox Talbot, owed its truthfulness to ‘nature drawing its own picture’, what did that suggest about the X-ray and its capacity to reveal the unseen?