In 1866, Alfred Russell Wallace proclaimed a “new branch of anthropology”
premised on the Spiritualist movement that was then exploding in popularity in
England. For Wallace, that anthropology would revolve around a growing body of
highly disputed evidence of life after death. While séances were one major site
for the evidence of spirits, other technologies were also important to the new
religion, including spirit photography, where ghostly figures or more amorphous,
ectoplasmic emanations would appear in photographs next to (living) humans
sitting for their portraits. Although these photographs brought solace to those
missing their loved ones, they were also windows onto a future utopia; after
all, the afterlife was a place where humans would continue to grow and develop
into more perfect beings, beings who had come back to help guide their still
living compatriots. While these photos appear to us today to be clumsy double
exposures, they suggest—along with their twentieth-century counterparts in
Dadaist montage—a source of social critique. And, indeed, Spiritualism was
readily embraced by social progressives of the day for just these reasons.
Interpellating other images onto a photograph both breaks the illusion of
objectivity in realist photography which is grounded in the indexicality of the
photograph (first discussed by Charles Saunders Peirce) (Peirce 1894: 4). In so
doing, spirit photography anticipates the challenges digitization, manipulation
and algorithmically generated images raise to the indexical truth-value of the
image.1 In this essay, I extend Wallace’s “new anthropology” to urban
applications of reverse image search, where search engines apply a combination
of indexed images, neural networks and machine learning in order to identify the
same or similar images across huge databases. Although mostly utilized for
locating copyright infringement, uncovering catfishing or identifying locations,
reverse image search also suggests a series of alternative “spirits” to photos
of urban spaces. In Baltimore, where my research has concentrated on issues of
urban gentrification and abandonment, reverse image searches of Baltimore’s
spaces reveal other possibilities—alternatives to urban divestment. For example,
a search based on a photo of a boarded-up block of stores in West Baltimore
generates images of bustling mercantile districts in cities all over the world.
Each of these images, in turn, is an argument against the neoliberal algebra
that has laid waste to cities and compounded poverty and segregation. By
overlaying images of Baltimore streets and facades with these ghosts of other
urban possibilities, I attempt to summon an anthropology of critical future
possibilities. In so doing, I identify another role for digital technologies:
one that conjures absent possibilities into urban presents through regimes of
Big Data that would otherwise be used for surveillance. The end of the essay
finds me revisiting Wallace’s “new branch of anthropology,” not to revive his
call for the study of ghosts, but for our work to include spirits of the future
in our critiques of present inequality.
Just published in
Semiotic Review
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