Stephanie Strahan
In the series My Childhood Ghosted Me, Stephanie Strahan appropriates the staged spiritualist photographic imagery of the Victorian Era as a way of playfully examining how societal expectations affect our behaviour and beliefs. In particular, ideas about innocence and childhood practices are reappropriated by using anonymity and the uncanny to examine how perception, imagination and inherited narratives shape emotional and rational responses to our sense of self. The construction of the images is deliberately ambiguous, allowing the figures to exist as projections of memory, emotion, and social experience reflecting on the ways childhood stories and experiences continue to follow us into adulthood.
The coincidental emergence of the spiritualism movement and the artistic practice of photography allowed for the genre of ‘Spiritualistic Photography’ to emerge. The early days of photography allowed for experimentation, so when William Mumler essentially discovered double exposures on accident, this allowed for him and numerous other ‘spirit medium’ photographers to take advantage of grieving populations. Through both glass exposures in the dark room and manipulation in print, many people were tricked into believing that real ghosts and spirits were caught on camera. This thesis will go through the evolution of spiritualistic photography, from its beginnings in the mid nineteenth century to recent modern day examples.
Stephanie Strahan is a neurodivergent visual artist currently based in Dublin, Ireland. With a
preference for digital photography as well as film and video editing on occasion. She takes her special interests and hyper fixations as inspiration, she often uses photography as a way of self-accommodating her disabilities when no one else will, using photographs as a way of storytelling when written words fail.
A lot of Strahan's work is based on how people see and place themselves within society.
In previous projects she has done this through religion, mythology and folklore. Some of
these things Stephanie grew up listening to or believing, so knew enough about them to
want to research them more.
