?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
(SPIRITUALISM) Album of 27 Spiritualist photographs taken during seances at Dr. Thomas Glendenning Hamilton's Psychic Room in Winnipeg, Canada. With images of camera equipment, levitation experiments, teleplasm, materializations, and psychic mediums in deep trances with supernormal ephemera. Silver prints, 21 measuring approximately 5x7 inches (12.7x17.8 cm.), and the reverse, and 6 measuring approximately 3 1/2x3 inches (8.9x7.6 cm.), all cornered into black pages and accompanied by copious explanatory handwritten text, in an unknown hand, in white ink. Oblong 4to, gilt-lettered faux leather with a twin bolt binding, front cover soiled. 1920-1922
Album acquired by the Private Collector's psychiatrist father.
Dr. T. Glen Hamilton was a Canadian psychiatrist and member of the Manitoba legislature. After the death of his young son, Hamilton took to Spiritualist investigations with mental telepathy, Ouija boards, and table tipping. Using their nanny as a medium, the Hamilton family investigated paranormal phenomena such as rappings, psychokinesis, ectoplasms, and materializations. Hamilton had a large bank of cameras, illustrated in the album, that he used to take thousands of photographs during seances held in his family's home.
The University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections houses the Hamilton family's papers, scrapbooks,photographs, and other ephemera relating to their Spiritualist research.
Hamilton's photographs have been exhibited at the Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art in Toronto, Magasin3 in Stockholm, the Maison europé de la photographie in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
