Multiple Exposure

Two or more exposures layered in one photograph or film frame, so that faces, places and moments overlap in a single image.

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About

A multiple exposure records more than one image on the same film, plate or sensor, either by firing the shutter again without advancing the film or by printing several negatives together. In the 1860s so-called spirit photographers such as William Mumler used it to add ghostly figures beside sitters, and Georges Méliès exploited superimposition for trick films around 1900.

Modernists saw expressive range in it. Maurice Tabard layered bodies, windows and objects in Paris around 1930, and Harry Callahan's double exposures of his wife Eleanor and of Chicago streets, made from the 1940s, merge figure and city. In cinema, superimposition became shorthand for dreams and memories. Jessica Eaton makes repeated in-camera exposures through coloured filters to build abstract compositions, while Stéphane Couturier overlays two views of a place. Look for transparent bodies, doubled contours and places where the light of one exposure fills in the dark of another.