In The Pencil of Nature Henry Fox Talbot, inspired by the camera’s potential to see beyond the limits of human perception, imagines a chamber lit by ultraviolet rays in which “…the eye of the camera would see plainly where the human eye would find nothing but darkness”. Talbot’s darkened chamber can be read as a metaphor of Plato’s Cave. Photography has always been conscious of its confinement within that subterranean metaphor. Since its origins in Spiritism and phantasmagoria, photography is often in service of some occult vision or pseudo-science. Practices such as; Spiritism, Phrenology, Anthropometry and Transcendentalism proclaim to perceive through the opacity of Newtonian surfaces to the secrets that lie beneath the world.