“Séances lost their popularity with the invention of infrared photography when it became possible to see what mediums were doing in the dark. Nowadays, spiritualists’ fakery is more ambiguous and subtle.”

— Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Derren Brown 136

British illusionist 1971

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“With the invention of printing, mass standardized culture had become possible.
With the inventions of photography and then cinema, the standardization of popular culture began to progress geometrically and its rate of change slowed down.
In addition, the complete documentation of daily life made possible by these technological advances presented the mass of humanity, for the first time in history, with a mirror in which to regard itself. Less and less had it been able to look away, as its own image became more detailed and perfect, especially with the burden of information that became available at the end of the twentieth century.
What this meant, in practical terms, was that retro was the only fashion.”

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“Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) American photographer

Alfred Stieglitz, as quoted in The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940, M. Orvell (1989). p. 220
Variant: There is a reality — so subtle that it becomes more real than reality. That's what I'm trying to get down in photography.

“[T]he invention of photography has made the painter and the patron lose interest in the likeness and transfer it to some more formal pattern. Our whole sensibility has been re-created by such subtle shifts.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

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“How do things stand, now, if the subject contains a large element of pathos?... Consider such an interesting subject as the scene taking place around the bed of a dying woman, for example; seize and render that ensemble by photography, if that is possible [photography was a very recent invention in Paris ca. 1853, a. o. by the photographer Nadar ]: it will be falsified in a thousand ways. The reason is that, according to the degree of your imagination, the subject will appear to you more or less beautiful, you will be more or less the poet in that scene in which you are an actor; you see only what is interesting, whereas the instrument puts in everything.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

In Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 233
quote circa 1853, in which Delacroix relates painting to theater from the view of the visitor / spectator
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“I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism—real life—the now.”

Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) American photographer

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“If any spiritualistic medium can do stunts, there is no more need for special conditions than there is for a chemist to turn down lights, start operations with a hymn, and ask whether there's any chemical present that has affinity with something named Hydrogen.”

Charles Fort book Lo!

Pt 1, Ch. 5 http://www.resologist.net/lo105.htm
Lo! (1931)

“…let it be remembered that as photography is our chosen medium, then if photography unaided will give us the effect we want there is no especial virtue in altering it.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Printing the picture and controlling its formation, p. 79

“The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of "Spiritualism" is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a "medium" hired at a guinea a séance.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

T. H. Huxley in Life and Letters Volume 1, p. 249
Misattributed

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Review in the Daily News (17 October 1871), quoted in Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley F.R.S (1900) edited by Leonard Huxley, Vol. 1, p. 452
1870s

“We believe what we see.’… What do you do when you’re in the dark?”

Yann Martel (1963) Canadian author best known for the book Life of Pi

“Séances lost their popularity with the invention of infrared photography when it became possible to see what mediums were doing in the dark. Nowadays, spiritualists’ fakery is more ambiguous and subtle.”

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Derren Brown 136

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