Fifty Photographs, One Haunted Night: Deep Shadows Goes Online

Fifty photographs made the cut for "Deep Shadows," an online Halloween exhibition juried by interdisciplinary artist Douglas Breault, drawn from what the organisers describe as "hundreds of submissions." That's a brutal acceptance rate for a seasonal open call — and the resulting roll call stretches from Richmond, Virginia to Isfahan, Iran.

The premise is unapologetically atmospheric. The exhibition, Breault writes, celebrates "the mysteries of Halloween," drawing on urban legends, Victorian-era lore and the uncanny. The selected images pursue "nostalgia and unease through haunting portraits, strange landscapes, and allusions to magic."

What does the work actually look like?

Titles do a lot of the storytelling. Teodora Apostolescu's "In the Stairwell Lives My Mother's Perfume" (Munich) reads like a line of gothic autofiction. Chiara Dondi's "Der doppelgänger" (Bologna) revives the most reliable of Victorian terrors. Marcel van Beek's "Nosferatu's Vigil" (Leipzig) tips its hat to Murnau outright — the vampire hasn't left the building since 1922.

Enid Crow's "The Stolen Ears Nurse" and Sam Yesko's "To Rip the Flesh" (Williamsport, MD) promise body-horror costumery, while Jillian Abir MacMaster's "Fancy Chicken" (Frederick, MD) suggests the uncanny can turn comic on a dime. Natalia De Ita's "Horned One," made in Chișinău, Moldova, and Guy Geva's "The Monster," from Israel, keep the folklore register. Scott Mansfield's "1634" (Rockport, MA) reaches back almost four centuries in a single title.

Place is a quiet theme of its own. Jean Ross's "Last Stop Coney Island," Alexa Cushing's "Haunted House" (Massachusetts), Richard Bonvissuto's "Cross House" (Buffalo) and Virginia Hines's "One Night in the Churchyard" (Sanquhar, Scotland) map an Atlantic geography of haunted architecture. Julia Abbott's untitled reflections, shot Upstate New York, and Alyssa Jones's "phantom" (Waco, TX) work the quieter end of the spectrum — suggestion over spectacle.

Who is behind it?

Breault is no hobbyist juror. His own interdisciplinary work — spanning photography, painting, sculpture and video — has been collected and exhibited at the MFA Boston, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in South Korea, Space Place Gallery in Russia, the Bristol Art Museum and the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts. He teaches photography at several colleges and writes about art. In short: a practitioner selecting practitioners.

How international is the field?

Considerably. Beyond the American strongholds — New York alone supplies roughly a half-dozen photographers, including Adele Quartley Brown ("Nightwatch"), Yujia Ma ("Market Dog"), Jess Levey ("If Memory Serves Me 1," Queens) and Dominic Quintana ("Halloween West Village") — the show reaches Ecuador (Gianella Silva's "Reverie," Guayaquil), Spain (Sylvia Perez's "Air ride," Barcelona), Hungary (Renata Icsu's "Ghost Package," Budapest), Italy (Vito Antonio Lerario's "Lights Into The Dark," Bari), Ukraine (Tetyana Bunyak's "Reading the flames," Lviv), Belarus (Pavel Aliakseyeu's "Ghost dog," Minsk), Iran (Farzaneh Kahnooji's "Held in the Dark," Isfahan) and Germany, with Pia Koop and works from Munich, Leipzig, Düsseldorf and Obing.

Even the art world's institutional haunts get a look: Roberto Cavazzuti's contribution, "Tate Ele Rudolf Stingel," was made in London — a ghost of a museum, perhaps, photographed at the scene.

What holds it together?

Breault's curatorial statement argues the real subject is restraint. Each chosen image, he writes, "invites viewers into a world where stories unfold through suggestion and ambiguity, revealing how much can be communicated by limiting what is seen and leaving the rest to the imagination." It's a small manifesto against the explicit — fitting for a holiday whose best imagery has always worked by half-light.

Leanne Trivett S.'s self-portrait "Houdini the Rabbit" (Johnson City, TN) and Maia Barbee's "A Knife To My Heart" (Austin) suggest the exhibition isn't afraid of theatricality either. The balance is the point: fifty photographers, one long night, and the argument that ambiguity photographs better than gore ever will.

The show runs online, which means no closing date to race — though with Halloween past, a follow-up edition seems the obvious next act.