“Ghostlight” takes its name from a commanding 2024 photograph by Stan Douglas that opens and closes the circular loop of his survey exhibition at the Hessel Museum of Art. In the image, the muted glow of a ghost light—a single, bare bulb—illuminates the empty screen and French Baroque interior of the Los Angeles Theater, a lavish Hollywood movie palace constructed in 1931 and defunct since 1994. Principally used in vacant auditoriums, such lights are also speculated to ward off a room’s lingering spirits. Idle and cloaked in shadow, the proscenium of Douglas’s image underscores a central focus of the exhibition: his concern with the ways we’ve pictured the world in past eras—and thus how we view the present—through images, written history, and mass media.