From Indexicality to Iconicity: Ghost Photography, Buddhist Perception, and the Ethics of Seeing
Nataly Shahaf
Yin-Cheng Journal of Contemporary Buddhism October 29, 2026 DOI: 10.66775/xdr3vz06 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Historical analysis Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Buddhism |
| Key points | Argues that early twentieth-century Chinese lay Buddhists and spiritualist associations used photography to visualize spirits, ancestors, and karmic consequences, and that Buddhist intellectuals reframed the medium as capable of revealing realities beyond ordinary perception. The author contends that ghost photographs express a Buddhist phenomenology in which seeing is an ethically conditioned act, and that these engagements turned photography into a practice of moral cultivation. |
Abstract
This paper examines how photography mediates between the visible and the invisible, arguing that images can function not only as indexical records of reality but also as iconic sites through which ethical, historical, and spiritual truths become perceptible. Drawing on research from my forthcoming book, Multiple Exposures: Ghost Photography, Buddhism, and Visual Heritage in Early Twentieth-Century China, I explore the practice of ghost photography among lay Buddhists and spiritualist associations, who employed photographic technologies to visualize spirits, ancestors, and karmic consequences. At a moment when scientific rationalism and anti-superstition campaigns challenged belief in ghosts and gods, Buddhist intellectuals and practitioners reframed photography as a medium capable of revealing dimensions of reality inaccessible to ordinary perception. Rather than treating ghost photographs as evidence of supernatural phenomena, I analyze them as expressions of a Buddhist phenomenology in which seeing is understood as an ethically conditioned act. These images rendered visible the otherwise unseen workings of karma, memory, and consciousness, challenging modern assumptions about photographic objectivity and truth. I argue that Buddhist engagements with photography transformed the medium into a practice of moral cultivation. The paper concludes by tracing resonances between these historical practices and contemporary artistic engagements with absence, displacement, and historical violence, showing how photographs continue to make invisible realities ethically and historically legible.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on buddhism, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mental balance and well-being: Building bridges between Buddhism and Western psychology. | 2006 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience | 1995 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Buddhist and Psychological Perspectives on Emotions and Well-Being | 2005 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Too Early to Tell: The Potential Impact and Challenges—Ethical and Otherwise—Inherent in the Mainstreaming of Dharma in an Increasingly Dystopian World | 2017 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| From self to nonself: The Nonself Theory | 2016 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |