From Indexicality to Iconicity: Ghost Photography, Buddhist Perception, and the Ethics of Seeing

This paper examines how photography mediates between the visible and the invisible, arguing that images can function not only as indexical records of reality but also as iconic sites through which ethical, historical, and spiritual truths become perceptible. Drawing on research from my forthcoming book, Multiple Exposures: Ghost Photography, Buddhism, and Visual Heritage in Early Twentieth-Century China, I explore the practice of ghost photography among lay Buddhists and spiritualist associations, who employed photographic technologies to visualize spirits, ancestors, and karmic consequences. At a moment when scientific rationalism and anti-superstition campaigns challenged belief in ghosts and gods, Buddhist intellectuals and practitioners reframed photography as a medium capable of revealing dimensions of reality inaccessible to ordinary perception. Rather than treating ghost photographs as evidence of supernatural phenomena, I analyze them as expressions of a Buddhist phenomenology in which seeing is understood as an ethically conditioned act. These images rendered visible the otherwise unseen workings of karma, memory, and consciousness, challenging modern assumptions about photographic objectivity and truth. I argue that Buddhist engagements with photography transformed the medium into a practice of moral cultivation. The paper concludes by tracing resonances between these historical practices and contemporary artistic engagements with absence, displacement, and historical violence, showing how photographs continue to make invisible realities ethically and historically legible.