Haunted Air by Ossian Brown

Ossian Brown, artist, musician, composer and member of the music groups Coil and Cyclobe, published Haunted Air in 2010. Haunted Air is a collection of extraordinary Halloween photographs, taken between 1875 and 1955 in America, and featuring a foreword by American director David Lynch and an afterword by author Geoff Cox.

The photographs in Haunted Air, some of them degenerated over the years of their existence, allow a glimpse into the traditions of Halloween celebrations long before consumerism diluted the magic. These anonymous photographs illustrate the roots of the medieval Celtic festival of Samhain, a celebration to mark the death of the old year and the birth of the new, when it was believed that evil spirits were passing through.

Over ten years Ossian Brown amassed a collection of ancient photographs, picturing unrecognizable people, masked and disguised to be not caught by the ghosts, radiating an outlandish and otherworldly atmosphere.

"All the clocks had stopped. A void out of time. And here they are - looking out and holding themselves still - holding still at that point where two worlds join - the familiar - and the other." David Lynch

LN-CC: Where did your fascination with the subject derive from?

Ossian Brown: I've always been interested in Hallowe'en and celebrated Samhain, so discovering these photographs, seeking out these 'ghost portraits', soon became an obsession, they riddled my imagination, they really shook me. I found the moods completely spellbinding not- and flabbergasting as well. As I kept discovering new pictures, it turned out that the truly remarkable ones all originated from America. I got lost in the worlds they conjured from the moment I set eyes on them. I'd not come across anything like them before, I felt like I'd tapped a vein, a phantom artery. They just kept coming, arriving and showing themselves to me, one by one.

LN-CC: How long did it take to amass your collection, and where did you source the images?

Ossian Brown: I spent many years hunting these pictures, ten years or more. The collection is still growing, in fact the house will be heaving by the time I die, overrun with these old wraiths and strays. I began collecting early photography from antique and bric-`a-brac markets like Brick Lane, Covent Garden, Camden Passage - all the old London markets now vanishing themselves. It really grew from there for me. I'm always out looking for interesting and inspiring pictures. The pictures came from all over America, a lot of them from the South. They turned up in junk stores, markets, house clearances, sold off by relatives with no interest in preserving their family history. The pictures have mostly been torn from old photo albums and passed through the hands of various dealers over the years. As a result they've become estranged from anything that could identify them, separated from the pictures that might have shown the same people but without their masks. They've become rootless, orphaned, unrecognizable to friends and relatives. And of course most if not all of the people have now died. So there's a pervasive melancholy that clings to the photographs, I feel, and that was certainly an aspect that drew me to them.

LN-CC: Are the images in Haunted Air part of a wider collection of esoterica?

Ossian Brown: Yes, I'm a magpie, so I'm always collecting; old masks, objects, photographs of stone circles, street urchins, church organs, speleothem photography. I have a large collection of paintings and drawings, most notably pictures by the visionary artist Austin Osman Spare. I find his work incredible, such an underrated and important British artist.

LN-CC: Halloween originated in Europe, but most of your photos are from America. What do you think it is about Halloween that captured the imagination of American culture?

Ossian Brown: Perhaps when traditions like Hallowe'en travelled over from Ireland and a lot of the old Gaelic/Celtic culture and history became 'disembodied', Americans felt a greater need to embrace those early traditions and really cling on to them. I think maybe that's how what began as Samhain survived so strongly there. Here we're largely complacent about it, although I think recently there's developed a greater drive in young people to preserve the old traditions, a resurgence of interest in festivals like the May Day celebrations, Jack in The Green or the Straw Man festival. I think the internet has helped, actually, replacing oral tradition and binding together communities that otherwise might feel fragmented and too spread out geographically.

It's wonderful that such a huge essentially pagan festival is celebrated so widely in America, second only to Christmas, but it's drowned in commerciality now, really since the fifties, with the introduction of mass-produced costumes and printed plastics. The magic has been diluted, the creativity and imagination dulled. In that sense you could view Hallowe'en pessimistically now, as something sterile and almost cannibalistic, with the dead eating the dead. The pictures I've collected celebrate the personal craft of Hallowe'en rather than the industrial facsimile parents buy off the peg for the kiddies at Wal-Mart or Tesco.

For me these photographs exude a magic and otherworldliness that's completely without clich'e - they have an atmosphere that seeps into the everyday and transforms it. They're not 'earthed' or normalised by commerce or popular culture, they're completely unhinged, completely 'other'. When I look at them I don't doubt them for an instant. It's not like experiencing people dressing up and hiding behind masks in front of me, they've really become their masks, the person has vanished quite literally. In the Depression-era Southern states where a lot of these photographs where taken, there was a great wealth of magic and creativity borne from the poverty through which people persevered, a real intensity of imagination, a belief that came alive in the year's shadows - you really sense the conviction. With costumes sewn together from old sack cloth, torn out eyeholes or broken buttons, dishrags stitched together with string and mangy fur stoles, rope tied around dusty old frocks, they've used whatever they could get their hands on and stitched them up into nightmarish new formations. You can find equivalents nowadays in Haiti, in the astonishing costumes they create for their many festival celebrations and rituals.

LN-CC: Do you have a particular favourite image from the book?

Ossian Brown: One of my favourite photographs would be the picture I used for the front cover. The negative has degenerated badly over the years, becoming blistered and pockmarked. A strange and very beautiful effect has occurred, like a bridge of ectoplasm arcing across the sky from the skeleton to a lady standing in the background. It's as if it's devouring her, dissolving her, or perhaps more interestingly the reverse, that she's in fact manifesting this chimeric image of death in front of us, like a premonition captured on film.

Another photograph that robs me of my breath every time I look is of a nightmarish cartoon-faced child snatcher. It's like some terrible black comedy unfolding, with this moon-eyed goon stealing away with his prize into the dark, illuminated briefly by the flash of a camera.

LN-CC: What is your Halloween costume of choice and will you be dressing up this year?

Ossian Brown: I'll be skyclad! Baking kornigou antler cakes.

Buy the signed version of the book Here.

Interview by Conor Donlon and Lilli Heinemann
Photography by Rory van Millingen