In 1989, Shannon Taggart’s cousin received a message at a Spiritualist service that revealed a strange family secret. Despite growing up an hour away from Lily Dale, New York —the world’s largest Spiritualist community—Shannon knew nothing about Spiritualism, the American-born religion that believes in communication with the spirits of the dead. It was her cousin’s experience that drew her in.
Visiting Lily Dale for the first time in 2001, Shannon planned to spend one summer photographing the community, but found she couldn’t leave.
‘Two revelations struck, holding me there,’ she says. ‘The first was my discovering that Spiritualism was once a seminal force in Western culture, influencing late nineteenth-century art, science, technology, entertainment and social reform—a legacy that was absent from every textbook I had ever studied, including my histories of photography. The second was a sinking feeling that the mediums in Lily Dale knew something about life that I didn’t.’
Shannon spent the next eighteen years researching, photographing and visiting Spiritualist communities across New York, the UK and Europe. Her resulting book Séance weaves together photography and text to offer a comprehensive insight into an often misunderstood subject and explore the affinities between the two ‘mediums’.
‘My aim with this book was to tell the story of Spiritualism, both past and present, with a particular focus on the relationship between Spiritualism and photography,’ Shannon explains. ‘My work isn’t arguing for or against the supernatural—the intention was to tell a story that inspired questions.’
While she initially approached the project from a straightforward documentary perspective, Shannon says she struggled to photograph Spiritualism in a way that was true to the psychological-emotional dimension of Lily Dale. She asked herself, ‘how do you photograph the invisible?’ But after a few happy accidents with her camera, she became more open to spontaneity and experimentation (ie. using long exposures).
Often, she’d find the photographic anomalies ‘synced up with the invisible reality of the experience’ she was documenting. Keeping a non-judgemental approach, Shannon invites us to generate our own interpretations.
In her pictures we encounter the womb-like chambers of séance rooms and portholes into private worlds, which evoke questions about truth and visibility. What is real and what is happening all around us that we cannot see and therefore know?
Shannon writes: ‘Spiritualism’s material world pulsates with unseen energies; disembodied communication flows in from unpredictable sources; flesh bodies and discarnate spirits tangle with one another in darkened rooms. Photographing mediums as they navigated these thresholds sometimes felt like catching sand. The resulting images are attempts to capture something from this borderland.’
All images © Shannon Taggart