Shannon Taggart
I'm giddy with anticipation about Shannon Taggart's forthcoming book, SÉANCE: Spiritualist Ritual and the Search for Ectoplasm. For those not familiar, Taggart is the world's foremost contemporary spirit photographer. She has created sublime, iconic images of Brooklyn Vodou rituals, Lily Dale mediumship, and other communities devoted to contacting the other side. She is also an extremely insightful lecturer and writer about such topics as ectoplasm, glitch, and the uncanny, and I was thrilled to have her present at the first Occult Humanities Conference at NYU, as well as to feature her work in my exhibition, Language of the Birds: Occult and Art.
This book will be a monograph that showcases her extensive explorations of Spiritualism, including photographs of her subjects channeling, table tipping, spoon bending, and having other spirit encounters. It's been a long time coming, and I'm excited to see this finally materialize.
One thing to note: this book is being crowd-funded through Unbound, and your pledge serves as a pre-order, which will ensure the book gets published. As such, there are various levels of support you can choose from over and above purchasing the book, and they include all sorts of otherworldly bonus items such as a bent spoon, a reading from a Lily Dale medium, and archival photo prints.
Have a read through the details below, and then please support this exceptional project if you are able! The spirits will thank you.
SÉANCE: Spiritualist Ritual and the Search for Ectoplasm
The mysterious process of photographing spiritualist transformation
Spiritualism, the American-born religion, attempts to demonstrate through the intercession of a medium that death is not the end, but a transition. I first became aware of Spiritualism as a teenager, after my cousin received a reading from a medium who revealed a secret about my grandfather’s death that proved to be true. Since then, I have been deeply curious about how a total stranger could have learned something my family had kept confidential.
In 2001, I began photographing at the place where my grandfather’s message was received: Lily Dale, New York, the town which is home to the world’s largest Spiritualist community. I quickly immersed myself in Lily Dale’s world, receiving readings, experiencing healings, joining in séances, attending a psychic college and sitting in a medium’s cabinet, always with my camera. I expected to spend one summer figuring out the tricks of the Spiritualist trade. Instead, Spiritualism’s mysterious processes, earnest practitioners, surprising cultural history and bizarre photographic past became a resource and an inspiration for my own work. I began a sixteen-year quest to document contemporary Spiritualism and to find and photograph ‘ectoplasm’ – the elusive substance that is said to be both spiritual and material.
Photographing Spiritualism presents a unique challenge: how do you photograph the invisible? Sitting in the charged atmospheres of the séance rooms I encountered, I wondered how to approach the exchange between a veiled presence and a visible body? Technical mistakes led me to explore the inherent imperfections within the photographic process. Unpredictable elements (blur, abstraction, motion, flare) seemed to insinuate, or refer to, the unseen. I began to use conventions that are considered wrong, messy, or ‘tricky’. I crossed the boundary of what is commonly considered unprofessional in the practice of photography: I invited anomaly. In playing with the process, the invisible was automated. My camera rendered some striking synchronicities. The resulting images consider the conjuring power of photography itself. I include these pictures that use photography’s own mechanisms to question spiritual realities: photographs that contain both mechanical and spiritual explanations and require an interpretation.
My book on Spiritualism will merge ethnographic study, journalism and art. I will contextualize Spiritualism’s history and highlight its surprising connections to nineteenth-century social reform, scientific inquiry, artistic practice and popular culture. Ultimately, this work seeks to amplify the reflexive relationship between Spiritualism and photography and to explore the ideological, material, geographical, historical and metaphysical correspondences between the two. Erik Davis, author of media studies cult classic TechGnosis and expert on the intersection between technology and the religious imagination, will contribute the foreword.
N.B. If you live in the United States, choosing a pledge level "With Postage to the USA" will ensure lower shipping rates.
Each generation produces a very small number of artists, researchers and seekers who bring great integrity and critical realism to study of the occult and paranormal. Shannon is one of the very few in our time. As a photographer and critically sympathetic researcher, Shannon demonstrates the most rare of traits: ability to think beyond given categories and never, ever to sacrifice intellectual integrity for drama or hasty conclusions. Shannon would be a stellar researcher in any field; but in this one, so fraught with pitfalls and blind alleys, she is a worldwide resource.
Mitch Horowitz, PEN Award-winning author of Occult America
SHANNON TAGGART is a photographer and independent researcher based in Brooklyn, New York. Her photographs have been exhibited and featured internationally, including within the publications TIME, New York Times Magazine, Discover and Newsweek. Her work has been recognised by Nikon, Magnum Photos and the Inge Morath Foundation, American Photography, the International Photography Awards and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace. From 2014 to 2016, she was Scholar and Artist-in-Residence at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in New York. Shannon lectures internationally on her work.
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