Mormonism was born in sight of the living dead. Joseph Smith described his “first vision” as a face-to-face forum with the formerly dead Jesus Christ.1 His translation of the Book of Mormon came after numerous meetings with the angel Moroni, who, Smith stated, “being dead, and raised again therefrom, appeared unto me, and told me where [the plates] were.”2 Smith reported seeing, speaking with, and following the instructions of various beings from beyond the veil of the living. Out of all this materialized what was ultimately called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.3 Smith's visions of spirits, angels, and plates provided the core of Mormonism, but also presaged a half century of widespread and intense engagement with the dead.Although the Latter-day Saint tradition emerged during the time of mesmerism, the implications of its relationship to spirits would become much more charged after Smith's death as spiritualism grew in popularity.4 During the second half of the nineteenth century, spiritualism effectively “generated an entire theology around . . . the utter connectivity of earthly existence and its relationship with the spirit-world,” as John Lardas Modern has described, especially by addressing the “materiality of spirit.”5 Latter-day Saints would eventually have to deal with articulating their overlap with and distinction from the seemingly similar tenets of spiritualism. Rooted in the belief in spirits, who can communicate with and through the living, spiritualism could be perceived as Mormonism's popular—yet dangerous—doppelgänger.The Mormon apostle Erastus Snow noted the irony. At the time of his visions, Smith was scoffed at, for claims of “communication with the unseen world” were “absurd.” They were “inconsistent with the spirit and enlightenment of the age.” But all that had changed. By the 1870s, Snow remarked there were millions of people communicating “with the unseen world, with spirits of departed friends, and receiving spiritual manifestations in various forms.”6 Latter-day Saints would adopt strategies of distancing themselves from these spiritualist operations, while continuing their own communication with and management of the dead.Of course, Latter-day Saint communication with the dead has been recorded, stored, and made accessible as data in myriad formats. From nineteenth-century manuscript accounts of visions to the current mammoth database of the dead in the Granite Mountain Records Vault and online, interaction between the living and the dead has powerfully shaped and enabled Mormon doctrine, practice, and salvation. In all these interactions with the spirit world, Latter-day Saints sought efficiency and clear signals. Their work was often the purifying of channels to reduce noise and hone in on messages from God, angels, or familiar spirits. Within this long history, the invention of photography with its “sensitive plates” suggested exciting new technological affordances for potentially capturing and storing spirits. Especially because it seemed to mix science and magic, spirit photography carved out a space for rational belief—hope scaffolded by technology.The inception of spirit photography provided a productive (im)possibility to tease out Latter-day Saint doctrine and culture as it forged its identity in the nineteenth century. Particularly in Utah, spirit photos not only appeared in connection with a burgeoning national entertainment industry around spiritualist events, but also the Church of Zion or “Godbeite” schism that broke with mainstream Mormonism and embraced spiritualism. In this context, I argue that spirit photography provided another border (a channel) for demarcating what it meant to be a Latter-day Saint. Through the creation of difference—via media channels that by their very nature presuppose a separation between two things—Mormons were able to articulate themselves against the static of the wider nation or world.Spirit photos evinced channels and random signs of the dead, but in conceptual and medium-specific terms they were all too “noisy” for Latter-day Saints. By this I mean that they were simultaneously socially disruptive (loud), photographically “foggy” (image noise) and, perhaps worst of all, meaningless (silent). Their signal-to-noise ratio was off. Spiritualists welcomed this ratio and “embraced the white noise of telegraphy and spirit photography.”7 They even found symbolic and supernatural meaning in the very appearance of blurriness. Mormons, on the other hand, expected more signal and less noise and followed a tradition of seeking to quiet and dispel noise in order to more clearly send and receive spiritual communication. Because of their implicit connection to the Godbeites and their signal-to-noise ratio, spirit photographs were dismissed as noisy nonsense. They lacked the sense and signal Mormons expected when communing with the dead.In June 1870, Mormon photographer Charles Carter made waves by producing and displaying spirit photographs in his Salt Lake City gallery.8 Without providing any surviving explanation, Carter presented (also no longer extant) photographs featuring the ghost of the recently deceased U.S. deputy marshal, Captain William Storey. Certainly there must have been the requisite word-of-mouth testimonies that often attended spirit photographs.9 However it came to be, the spectral figure of this unfortunate local hero appeared with a small child on one glass plate and next to a woman on another.10 The monochrome two-dimensional image of the marshal belied a colorful backstory—a three-dimensional life full of drama and a tragic demise.Storey had been killed in action during a tense gunfight with the outlaw Albert H. Haws. The fugitive had recently fled Nevada where he was wanted for murder. Storey was called in to locate and arrest Haws. Accompanied by Nevada deputy sheriff Joseph F. Carrigan, Storey soon found and approached Haws in Grantsville to arrest him. But just after Haws had surrendered, he tricked the officers when he “made a spring” and “grabbed the pistol which [Carrigan] had leveled at him.”11 Haws immediately opened fire on the officers and although Carrigan narrowly escaped without injury, two bullets struck Storey killing him instantly. Storey's body was then conveyed to Salt Lake City that same day.12Storey's dead body was in the city, but just how did his living likeness appear in Carter's photograph a few weeks later? Answering this question would require aligning oneself with differing attitudes toward spiritualism, which had been on the lips of many in recent months. While the Salt Lake Herald suggested that perhaps someone had just tampered with Carter's plates unbeknownst to him, the proclivity to believe cameras might capture ghosts or that Storey's spirit might have unfinished business rooted viewers in diverging traditions of Mormonism at the time.13In direct response, rival photographers Charles Savage and George Ottinger produced their own competing ghost likeness.14 Their reaction only heightened the scandal. It was soon reported that the spirit in Savage and Ottinger's photograph very closely resembled the original specter in the photograph on display at Carter's. A journalist covering the story commented how “the sensation of that spectral photograph at Mr. Carter's gallery is spoiled—emphatically spoiled. Savage & Ottinger got up a ghost picture on Friday that knocks it out of time.”15 Savage and Ottinger had created a photo that ostensibly featured the exact same figure of Storey, challenging both the novelty and credibility of Carter's original. Savage and Ottinger were also both photographic contributors to the anti-Godbeite periodical, Keep-A-Pitchinin, which had just recently increased its publication frequency from occasional broadsides to become a regular bimonthly paper.16As with other phenomena of spiritualism, viewers of the Carter spirit photograph were invited to vacillate between modes of excited acceptance and rational (dis)belief. As David Walker has argued, spiritualism thrived in inviting such doubt and letting individuals decide for themselves, often by providing “technologies of disenchantment and the tools of ritual critique.”17 Combining science and religion also meant toying with the growing entertainment industry that peddled such spiritualist curiosities for enthralled audiences.18 But some had no interest in the convergence of entertainment and visualizing the dead. The editor of the Salt Lake Herald remarked, “to create such a belief under the circumstances would be cruel to the parents of the child [in the first photograph] and wrong to the public, when it had no foundation in fact.”19 For some viewers, there appeared to be no room for accommodating such spiritual entertainments.In a letter to the editor of the Deseret News a concerned citizen warned readers about Carter who had “succeeded in photographing a spirit from the other world.” But the author wrote it off, suggesting it was a mere “double apparition” and had more do with alcoholic spirits than supernatural ones. The author's explanation was explicitly meant to dispel the prevailing impression that “the gallery [was] haunted by spirits from another world.”20Keep-A-Pitchinin, extended the joke and included illustrations that revealed how spirits appeared and disappeared. In the images, a large bottle of old Jamaican rum stands over the caption, “the appearance of the spirit.” This is followed with an image of a man drinking the alcohol with the caption “disappearance of the spirit.”21 The author even added the suggestion of which “spirits” were taken by the photographers John Olsen and Savage and Ottinger respectively.It seems however that Carter might have had the last laugh. Likely because Ottinger was heavily involved with the Salt Lake Theater where he painted scenery, Savage and Ottinger photographed Philip Margetts, the prominent Utah actor in several portraits, sometimes even in costume.22 But Carter created a series of spirit photographs with Margetts and his spirit double, which still survive in Carter's glass plate negative collection.23 It is important to note that Carter's meddling with spirit photography had wider cultural resonance. Rather than mere visual curiosity or entertainment, spirit photography in this instance helped reveal and structure the discursive formation of Mormonism against spiritualism in both historically and technologically specific terms.This short sensation came just six months after William S. Godbe, Elias Harrison, and their followers founded the “Church of Zion” in an attempt to separate “religion and commerce, private and public, spirituality and temporality,” resulting in a splintering of the Latter-day Saints and the Godbeites. But perhaps even more distinctive, the Church of Zion members often sought to use the language and attitude of spiritualism as a sort of “murky mirror” to remember the spiritually “effervescent days of Joseph” and to ensure the privileging of spiritualities over temporalities.24 As Godbeites more completely claimed their spiritualist connections, debunking and delegitimating them was paramount for Latter-day Saint leaders during the middle months of 1870. This means the entire operation of both housing a supposed spirit photograph and entertaining its dismissal functioned as a crystallization in glass of the broader discursive debate over the schismatic new church.It was, perhaps, to be expected that Spiritualists would take up the camera to render specters visible. Technologies, such as the telegraph, planchette, and typewriter were all co-constitutive with spiritualist practices. At times, technologies seemed to spawn the form or function of spirit communication, such as the Fox sisters’ Morse code-like rapping or automatic writing in séances.25 Even electrical currents provided the “language and exemplary behavior” to “account for the power of circles,” circuits, and seating arrangements used in séances.26 In these responses, as well as the fervor around “the technological sublime,” one might glimpse the cultural working through of new media capabilities.27 Radical new inventions and realizations seemed to require radical reinterpretations of this world and the next.In other cases it was reversed. For instance, psychical research and conceptions of “distant vision” actually preceded (inspired?) the invention of electrical television.28 There was room for the entanglement of both science and spiritual experiences to shape the future of communication technologies. For the religiously inclined, approaching technology was charged with various hopes and anxieties. Beyond media representations shaping conceptions of identity and worldview, the medium itself often seemed to offer either sublime potential or new and pernicious pitfalls. The numerous exclamations about the “revelatory, mysterious powers” of new media captivated scientific and religious minds alike.29 The adoption, rejection, or navigation of new media for Latter-day Saints, who pursued their own spiritual interactions, was often deliberately unique insofar as it sought to purify and elevate the medium to avoid profanation of the sacred into human or even demonic devices.Influential technologies have at times developed out of Mormon contexts, but in many ways, media have always shaped Mormonism.30 Beyond providing channels for church-sponsored messages, media shape how visionary, revelatory, and sublime experience is grasped and (recon)figured by its users. For Latter-day Saints, emergent technologies required navigation and balancing being in the world, but not of it.31 Media also provided opportunities to (re)create and culturally construct, at any given moment, what it meant to be Mormon. The very anxieties raised by media could often be addressed in their careful adoption. Unique media practices often sought to combine spirit and technology, while demarcating between Latter-day Saints and others; and photography was no exception in this process.In general, the medium of photography galvanized cultural conceptions of registering the invisible dead through sensitivity. Like human spiritualist mediums, photographic plates were automatic and negative. As Tom Gunning has traced, photography was passive, “but passive in a particularly dynamic way.” It was productively sensitive precisely because any medium “had to be, in spiritualist parlance, feminine, or negative . . . in order to let the spirit world manifest itself.”32 Because it captured what the human eye might not, “spiritualism latched onto photography as the technology that could mediate the ephemeral threshold of death.”33 It was a medium on the borderland between the visible and invisible—between the living and the dead. The resultant spirit photographs were popularized by practitioners such as William Mumler, who began peddling likenesses of clients joined by blurry spectral figures in the 1860s. The phenomenon grew in popularity and controversy throughout the late nineteenth century, as many desperate to communicate with the other side were granted that possibility, while others saw only opportunistic deceit.In fact, spirit photography might have nicely technologized Mormonism's firm grounding in a unique materialism.34 Clearly inspired by Joseph Smith's assertion that “all spirit is matter,” in 1856 Brigham Young declared, “if the Lord would permit it, and it was His will that it should be done, you could see the spirits that have departed from this world, as plainly as you now see bodies with your natural eyes.”35 This latter-day hope also represented a powerful materialist interpretation of biblical instances of having one's eyes opened to see beyond the natural world.36 With this in mind, spirit photography might just capture the Mormon reality of an otherwise invisible deceased loved one still in someone's midst. But rather than prove a doctrinal tenet, spirit photography—though fascinating and scandalous—simply mechanized and (in their eyes) cheapened a Latter-day Saint cultural technique. Saints had some sense of what to expect from the hereafter and the value of spirit communication; and proper work on behalf of the dead could even result in visitations from the dead. These appearances could serve as feedback loops ensuring the efficacy of the living's work of recording, performing ordinances, and remembering the dead. But registering these interactions with spirits was simply of a different technical order and based on notions of progress and the communication of intelligence, rather than exhibitionist displays or technological solace.Developing the dead for Latter-day Saints was not a photographic chemical process. It was a method of research, records, proxy work, and prayer.37 Then one might hope to commune with departed spirits who could dispense intelligence. As converts were instructed in the 1850s, once they had demonstrated their desire through effort, it was possible that “some kind angel from the spirit world will be justified in bringing you the necessary intelligence.”38 This expectation was certainly a source of inspiration for Godbeites. And although Joseph Smith had described Mormonism as a religion of liberty in belief and with an aversion to creeds, navigating the practice of spiritualism proved difficult.39 Because they represented radical modern thinking by engaging “religious conspiracy, séances and apparitions from beyond the veil,” the Godbeites were largely met with ridicule.40 But they were much more open to accepting and practicing the operations of spiritualism that were so often dismissed by others. Although the practice of spirit photography was never fully adopted in Mormon circles—not even in Godbeite ones—its association with spiritualism made it an easy target to separate the traditions. Spirit photography, then, provided Mormonism a medium to engage the project of secularism, or “structuring the world” as Peter Coviello has described it, by enabling them to differentiate between their own religion and a spurious Other in spiritualism.41 Critiquing and dismissing spiritualism in general, and spirit photography in particular, might even help validate Mormonism and get it on the right side of history.By offering up medium-specific opportunities to let in otherwise imperceptible noise and capture ghosts, spirit photography created a technological space to work through Mormon doctrine, especially hopes and anxieties around noise. I use the term noise here to get at two different but connected meanings. First and primarily, noise is static. Like the salt and pepper or white noise of an untuned television set, noise lacks a signal and semantic value. Scholars have begun to analyze the effect and possibilities of noise as glitches, pops, and cracks in audio. This kind of noise is often “situated within excess, as a transgressive act that exceeds managed data.”42 But noise attends all media as disruptive or distracting elements often inherent to the channel or medium. Michel Serres has emphasized its centrality with a riff on the book of John, “in the beginning was the noise.”43 Following this assertion alerts us to a critical reorientation, namely “the fundamental relationship is not between sender and receiver, but between communication and noise.”44 While forms of noise are often unwanted specters haunting the limits of a medium, they also offer possibilities and make signal recognizable as such. Noise is then “both destroyer and creator of order.”45 The breaks between signals in telegraphy are just as important as the dots and dashes. In order to process signal there must be an opposition in all things.In this sense of static, noise also captures the medium-specific blurriness of photographic images. Although the term image “noise” was frequently used to describe photos only after radio static popularized the word, originally visual forms of photographic noise were referred to as “halation,” and blurring.46 Depending on solutions and exposure, photos were “grainy” or victims of a “fog.”47 What was later “unlistenable” or “ear-splitting” was first invisible or indecipherable for the eyes.48 As early photographers knew, when soaking glass plates for development “impure matter manifests itself though the substratum in the form of spots, specks, and stains.”49 This grainy effect of early photography shaped viewing practices of seeking out overlooked details and discovering objects or views, even those unintentionally captured in a photograph. In the imperfections and cold mechanical work of the camera possibilities abounded. The serendipitous process of “the world present[ing] itself to the photographic apparatus in an aspect different from any it could ever present to the unaided human senses,” suggested photography's “optical unconscious” according to Walter Benjamin.50 Noise for photography before 1880 was even the play between light and darkness, before “advances in optics made instruments” able to “wholly overc[o]me darkness” and render a mirror-like clarity of subjects.51 The frequent blurriness of photography opened doors for ambiguity and interpreting otherwise fixed images. As these kinds of noise are “always present in communication,” their “reciprocal relationship with signal deserves more of our attention.”52Second, I utilize the term noise in the straightforward popular sense to get at the further cultural connotations that echo from it. By this I mean the operations of Spiritualists could be both literally loud and socially disruptive. This kind of noise was uncommon from normal photography, but was the driving force in a complaint made in Salt Lake City in 1902 against the Arnold-Dickson brothers, who were notorious spirit photographers and clairvoyants. They would usually act as mediums and speak with deceased loved ones on behalf of paying clients. However, the “rappings” from beyond the grave were reportedly especially noisy “when the Spiritualists were photographing spirits, as they did very often.”53 Their sonic disruption while capturing spirit likenesses led to their eviction from the flat, while the suspicion around the practice led to their eviction from histories of photography.Noise as sonic disturbance vexed Latter-day Saints who sought to hear the word of God through imperfect channels. As Amanda Beardsley has noted, Brigham Young would even suggest in 1875 how to avoid noise as acoustic nuisance in the tabernacle by asking “women to bring extra overcoats and skirts to help dampen unwieldy or rampant echoes so congregations could better hear his sermons.”54 He had similarly instructed doormen to wear “India-rubber shoes” to ensure their silence.55 Noise—in various forms—was an ever-present issue for a religion focused on unadulterated clarity in the face of disturbances and distractions. As a parasitical contaminate, noise could distort the pure communication of the Holy (G)host.All these semantic layers of noise combined to render spirit photography quite incompatible with Mormonism. In fact, these multivalent features of “noise” give credence to a claim made by Michael W. Homer that there are no Mormon examples of spirit photography. Homer noted how “Mormons never conducted séances or took ectoplasmic apparitions or spirit photographs seriously,” even if many outsiders correlated spiritualism and Mormonism in their minds.56 Yet, the noise of spirit photography gave it a critical force to make identity and nonidentity clear.57 It is certainly true that there are no surviving records of extensive engagement or sincere belief in spirit photography from Latter-day Saints. But there were important brushings with the practice that reveal deeper cultural shifts at work. That is to say, the existence of one-off spirit photographs within the Mormon tradition revealed more than just the deceased; they materialized anxieties around religious movements and technology.Rather than entertain spirit photography, Mormons—like many of their American counterparts—utilized the truth claims of the photographic medium that seemed to capture a solid reality. This conditioned a kind of “what you see is what you get” mentality. Connecting photographic truth to biological sight, church apostle John Taylor declared in 1867: “There is something very remarkable in the construction of the human eye; it is something like these photographic instruments that receive impressions, only he gazes upon them and his eye takes them in.”58 There exists a sincere reliability. Both eye and lens simply register the reality in front of them. Taylor was confident that “Daguerreotyping, or as it is more generally called photography,” was “another great achievement of the human mind,” that updated realist painting with automated precision, “conferring the power to take likenesses, landscapes and views in a moment, which formerly required days or months, even by the most eminent artists.”59 Similarly, fellow apostle Erastus Snow compared the medium to the “law of restoration” with a sense of karmic fidelity. “No individual can wrong another without that wrong being thrown back upon himself,” he proclaimed, before relating this to the photographic apparatus. Snow continued: “This is just as sure as that your face is reflected in a camera when the light shines upon it. You go into a photographic gallery to have your likeness taken; you sit down opposite the camera, and the effect of the light upon the instrument is to make it reflect an exact likeness of yourself. It is precisely similar with every evil action.”60 The technology harnessed light and truth through capturing exactly what was in front of the camera. The ontological realism of the medium shaped “beliefs and attitudes regarding photographic representation” as an index to reality.61 While others saw photography as more magical, the realist strand of belief left little to no room for deception or human intervention. Although Americans were increasingly concerned with photographic manipulation, it was common “to consider photographs as direct, unmediated reflections of nature.”62 It is telling that photography not only attended the development of historicism, but also Comtean positivism.63The problem with this straightforward faith in the photographic image was crystallized in spirit photography. A 1902 book on the subject declared, “you can deceive the human eye, say the advocates of spirit materializations, but you cannot deceive the eye of science, the photographic camera.”64 Their uncanny sensitivity, both mechanical and otherworldly, could potentially register what the naked eye could not. Photos could actually make “visible in objective form the immaterial phantasms that the optical revolution [and enlightenment] had exorcized.”65 Unlike spiritual visions, spirit photographs offered “secondary manifestations of the supernatural—the visible, residual and physical imprint of their invisible and immaterial presence.”66 For many Americans the rage for photographs of dead ancestors or anonymous specters quickly spread. While Mormons were baptizing their deceased ancestors, others were searching for the spirits of theirs in fuzzy black and white images, the veracity of which was always contested. But the ghost images themselves seemed at odds with the mechanical verisimilitude of the medium. If it was understood to reach across the borders of life and death, then perhaps something demonic was at work in the photographic apparatus.Although photographs supposedly elided human intervention, it's important to remember that retouching and special effects were increasingly commonplace by the late 1800s. As Savage noted during his trip along the coasts of the nation studying photography, he could not “find two men who worked precisely alike,” and most included retouching in their services.67 Periodicals from the Photographic Times to the Salt Lake Herald, even printed instructions on how to create your own “ghost or shadow picture” around the turn of the century.68 But this later awareness of manipulation initially appeared to be more of a practitioner's insider understanding. The popular reactions to spirit photography originally blossomed in the 1860s after William Mumler's work gained notoriety.In fact, the court case against Mumler amplified discourses surrounding authority and practices of beholding. The trial and the many responses it elicited “quite literally positioned the Bible and the camera as competing mechanisms of religious authority in modern America.”69 Reports of Mumler's New York court trial for fraud also sparked interesting responses within Mormonism. The intent of the excerpt reprinted by the Millennial Star in July 1869 was to debunk the practice. The writeup recounted how a photographer was even brought into the court room to demonstrate “how ghosts are made.” But the excerpt noted, as witnesses came forth, that even a judge spoke in Mumler's defense stating, “spirits have materiality; not that gross materiality that mortals possess, but still they are material enough to be visible to the human eye.”70 Appropriately, no one seemed sufficiently able to definitively prove or disprove the practice.Unlike the skeptical article excerpted in the Millennial Star, the writeup of the trial in Utah's Deseret News concluded “the evidence given for the defense in the Mumler case shows that something unheard of hitherto in the photographic art has been accomplished by him.” Adding that many of the spiritualist advancements were “utterly useless and nonsensical,” yet Mumler's work, if true, “verifies the saying in Hamlet about there being more things in heaven or in earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy.” Even though there existed plenty of deception, the operations of the Spiritualists still had something “that the most profoundly scientific minds of the age are unable to account for on natural principles or by human agency.”71 This reco