The photographs were taken in houses throughout the United States where ghosts were reported. The project was inspired by ghost stories told by Victorian female authors. These narratives undermined the conventions and politeness of society; unearthed family secrets of infidelity and murder. The ghosts expressed what the women could not, and the Victorian women who penned these stories are often regarded as the true ghosts. Similarly, I am a ghostly presence/absence in my images, crossing boundaries and passing through houses of various class and regions. In being the medium through which the spirit of these houses is recorded, I continue the tradition of female sensitivity to the supernatural. All of the photographs were taken while I was in my 20's, traveling across the United State alone, a flaneur of the domestic interior.
The densely detailed photographs were taken with a 4 x 5 view camera using available light, with exposures ranging from a few seconds to a few hours. The accumulation of over 80 images reflects an obsessive scientific-like investigation. The installation allows the images to function both independently and as a group. You cannot look at a single image and conclude what a haunted house looks like, but taken together the individual images build off of each other becoming rooms in a never-ending, quintessential haunted house. A house with vestiges from the Victorian period, a parlor attic and a basement, old fashioned bedspreads, lace curtains on the window, and cozy chairs. These ordinary, somewhat tawdry spaces are the ideal site for Freud’s notion of the uncanny, where the safety of the home is invaded by unknown forces, repressed memories, and events.
The photographs refuse to be pinned down and fit into any neat system of classification: they were taken following a documentary tradition, yet they are highly subjective; they reference spirit photography but reveal no spirits; they resemble but do not conform to the standards of architectural photography; they reflect cinematic views popularized in the horror genre, yet without the accompanying sound effects, dramatic lighting and action, they do not incite horror. Lastly, there are no people in the photographs thus foregrounding what is not there; a lingering absence/presence.
Haunted House also includes an archive of first-hand ghost stories. The stories were collected on location and over the phone. They range in length from a few minutes to an hour. The voice is captured much like the space. Both image and text are haunted by absence, history, memory, and the possibility of never being seen or heard. Unlike the majority of horror films where the ghosts arrive as a result of an inopportune death, or to right a wrong, the inhabitants of these houses are often at a loss for why the ghosts are there, and in some cases the ghost is considered a source of comfort.
Haunted House
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Click here to listen to oral ghost stories
All content © Corinne May Botz
