The Art of Ectoplasm: Encounters with Winnipeg’s Ghost Photographs. Serena Keshavjee, editor. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2023. 318 pp. 9781772840377

For someone with only the most peripheral knowledge of the Hamilton Family Fonds, the perceptive, interdisciplinary prism of this book was a fortunate introduction. Editor Serena Keshavjee has brought together a diverse group of academics and archivists who, in a series of nine essays, collectively provide context and a critical gaze that forces us to look carefully at what this fonds, held at the University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections (UMASC), helps to document. As such, this book should be of considerable interest to a wide audience. For archivists specifically, it also provides a case study in acquisition and outreach. Thomas Glendenning (T.G.) Hamilton and his wife Lillian were a professional middle-class couple living in Winnipeg at the turn of the 20th century and during its early decades. T.G. was a doctor, Lillian was a nurse, and their surviving offspring were all university educated (pp. 123–27). The Hamilton Family Fonds is extensive and consists of glass plate negatives and slides; photographs; albums; and various textual records including minutes, correspondence, and ephemera (p. 168). It reflects their interest and research in various aspects of psychic phenomenon: “rappings, clairvoyance, trance states and trance charts, telekinesis, wax molds, bell-ringing.” Among this material are photographs and minutes from séances held in the Hamilton home. T.G. Hamilton, who set up the cameras and plates, “released the flash, took and printed almost every photograph” (p. 53) during these events, and described the resulting images as “monstrously extraordinary” (p. 227); more recently, they have been called “jaw-dropping” (p. 167). Samples of these images and album pages with notes have been beautifully reproduced throughout the book. For first-time viewers, they are, at the very least, surprising and unexpected. These photographs elicited contradictory reactions in editor Serena Keshavjee, who called them “simultaneously uncanny and compelling, silly and serious,” yet nevertheless, “one of the most important photographic archives in Canada” (p. 5). That she came to know of their existence at all might appear serendipitous; while she was giving a talk on her PhD research in 1997 at the University of Manitoba, “someone casually mentioned that there were ‘ghost’ photographs at UMASC taken by a local family physician” (p. 5). What ultimately resulted was The Art of Ectoplasm, which mainly explores the age in which the Hamiltons lived; their beliefs and actions, as well as those of others during that period; and how those resonate today. These essays consider the impact of the 1919 pandemic on Winnipeg and provide a close, empathetic telling of its impact on one family. They explore the development of scientific theory and accepted practices and concepts within biology, evolution, and psychology, together with the influence of people from Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini to Nobel Prize winner Charles Richet and philosopher Henri Bergson. An essay that reconsiders the Hamiltons’ work by viewing it in terms of gender was insightful, and biographies of all the participants in the Hamilton séances similarly added to an understanding not only of the characters and personalities involved but also of the underlying issue of economic disparities among them (as well as the economic hardship Lillian Hamilton endured following the death of her husband). While the Hamilton fonds may be about death, it is also fundamentally about hope, belief, and systems of belief – particularly Protestant Christianity. Spiritualism, “rampant following the tragedy of World War I” (p. 46), was emphatically rejected by the Hamiltons, but others prominent at the time, including Arthur Conan Doyle and his wife Jean Leckie, were adherents (p. 47). This aspect, too, is mentioned in these essays. Popular culture, including the influence of film …