Felicity T. C. Hamer is a Montreal-born mother of two, vocalist and current PhD candidate in the Communication Studies Program at Concordia University. Perplexed by her own emotional response to photographs, she ventures to understand the complex ways in which photographic portraits extend our relationships beyond physical death. Within this context, Hamer examines the therapeutic potential of photography associated with death rituals and of Victorian-era Spirit Photography in particular. Her research focuses on memory and imagination through photography; bereavement and photography; emotional engagement with photographs; paranormal, supernatural, magical and miraculous imagery; and intersections of religion and photography.

Her dissertation project, “Developing Memory: Remembrance, Embellishment, Hauntography,” establishes and then develops the existence of a form of bereavement through photography that she names hauntography. Some photographic objects seem to become so enmeshed in the activity of imaginative remembrance that their ability to participate is no longer dependant on the viewable object. Misplaced or intentionally avoided, these mementoes can take on a hauntographic presence – retaining an affective charge that echoes the very phantoms they were meant to commemorate. Hauntographs are skeuomorphs – retaining the now-superfluous attributes of objects that, for a time, hosted the now-disconnected remembrance activity.

Some ideas that will shape early chapters of this dissertation were recently published in book form, part of a series entitled ‘Sharing Death Online’ (F. T. C. Hamer, Parental Grief and Photographic Remembrance, [Bingley: UK, Emerald Publishing, 2020]). In an article, based on her MA Art History thesis, she challenges the dominant narrative of spirit photography’s development (F. T. C. Hamer, “Helen F. Stuart and Hannah Frances Green: the original spirit photographer”, History of Photography, 42, no. 2 [2018]: 146–167).