I was away in France two weeks ago in an old house that always inspires me to channel my inner ‘spirit photographer’, hoping to create and/or capture some kind of phantasmagoria with my camera. The latest KA prompt saw me thinking about how I could manifest a shadowy apparition in the looking glass of the old wardrobe in one of the big rooms upstairs. I was thinking about ‘Candyman’ and all the urban legends like it, in which you stand before a mirror and say the name of someone three times—not praising them exactly, but close—in the hope/fear that they will appear in the mirror as summoned. I created a very simple ‘silhouette’ out of cardboard and three black plastic tablecloths and then suspended the ad-hoc figure from a beam on a length of black elastic.
That done (with the whole set-up looking very unpromising, I must say!), I then went about taking long exposures of the silhouette as I pushed and pinged it about, seeking to produce some suitably shadowy effects. As you may imagine, there were many photographs taken during this process in which nothing transformative happened at all (just some sweaty bloke in a very hot room shoving a crude figure about and hoping for the best), but there were others in which something rather more ‘unheimlich’ resulted…
Red's Kingdom 
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