by Photographer Shannon Taggert has started a campaign to fund a book of photographs she’s taken of seances over the past sixteen years. You will see how gorgeous these photographs are when you go to her campaign page and watch the brief video about the project. I’m in!!
From Shannon: “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 someone could know such a thing.
“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 – I received readings, experienced healings, joined in séances, attended a psychic college and sat 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 body of 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.”
Lily Dale!