The Spirit Photographer

In 1870 Boston, Elizabeth Garrett's insistence that her abolitionist senator husband, James, accompany her to Edward Moody's studio to capture the image of their dead son in a "spirit photograph" sets in motion events that disrupt personal and professional lives. What appears on the photograph is an image not even Moody can explain: a young black woman, Isabelle, who had disappeared years earlier. While James employs desperate measures to conceal his past relationship with Isabelle to save his political career, Edward and his assistant, a former slave named Joseph Winter, head to New Orleans to learn what happened to her. As Edward and Joseph relentlessly search for Isabelle, the plot incorporates elements of magic realism and Southern gothic in a sometimes confusing tangle of memory, speculation, and suspicion. Edward is modeled after famed spirit photographer Edward Mumler, and the 1870 court case in which he was tried for fraud figures prominently here. An overarching question is the extent to which photography captures reality or alters perceptions.