Haunted Houses
Published by Phaidon Books/The Monacelli Press (September 2010).
Hardcover: 208 pages, 10.4 x 0.8 x 8.3 inches
ISBN-13: 978-1580932912
Available for order at Phaidon and Amazon
For more than ten years, Botz searched for ghost stories in buildings across the United States. She ventured into these haunted places with both camera and tape recorder in hand; her photographs, accompanied by first-person narratives, reveal a rare glimpse into American interiors, both physical and psychological. This book includes more than eighty haunted buildings, from the legendary to the ordinary, including Edgar Allan Poe’s house in Baltimore, a New Jersey tavern, and a Massachusetts farmhouse, a log cabin in Kentucky, and a number of private residences. The text includes ghost stories told to the author by those who lived through unexplained occurrences.
Selected Press:
A haunting is a doorway into the private history of place. Such is the idea of Corinne May Botz's compelling collection of photographs (and accompanying oral narratives) from eighty allegedly haunted houses, which includes mostly private residences…Nineteenth-century spiritualists employed photography as a medium to the afterlife, and in her fine literary introduction Botz nods to this, explaining how she worked “in the Victorian tradition of female receptivity to the otherworldly.” But it isn’t foggy shapes that she’s out to capture, but something else unseen: a house’s own signs of being, and how a dwelling place merges with the worlds of its inhabitants, past and present.
- Kolby Yarnell, Bookforum
There is scope for even the most committed skeptic to enjoy Botz's book — if for no other reason than the eerily beautiful images, which seek to capture a sense of "haunted" spaces rather than images of spirits. However, there are plenty of chills, too: the book is a series of images, accompanied by oral histories of people who inhabit these haunted spaces — both famous and unknown.
- Sadie Stein, Jezebel
By giving us images of empty spaces, Botz allows the viewer to create their own version of the unseen…The houses photographed are for the most part, firmly in the middle class, the homes of regular folks, underscoring the universality of the tales. Ask anyone if they have a family or personal ghost story and more often than not, they do.
- Andrea Janes, The Rumpus
Most of the stories Corinne recorded are mild, tame, and there is, I’m sure, a way to see this project as a failure – a failure to adequately capture hauntings on camera; a failure to summon what we expect from ghost stories. But this failure is part of the work’s texture. There is, Corinne notes in her introduction to the book, an inherent ambiguity to photography, and the stories and images she collects are incomplete – this imperfection points to ‘the failure for either words or images to properly elucidate the world’. Perhaps this was what made certain readers so frustrated: the failure of the photos to render visible what is hidden. Titling her project Haunted Houses prompts us to begin searching for what is missing. We grapple with the lack of evidence while we’re looking for it; the absence fuels our gaze.
-Laura Maw, Granta
