Picturing the Invisible: Spiritualism and Photography With Shannon Taggart
Shannon Taggart, photo-artist, author, and CSWR artist-in-residence, began her career as a photographer. Over time, her work developed into a sustained exploration of Spiritualism, visual culture, and the long history of attempts to represent what cannot be seen.
In 2001, she visited Lily Dale, a small hamlet in northwestern New York, to create a short documentary about Spiritualism, a religious and philosophical movement centered on communicating with the dead. Instead, the visit opened onto a much larger inquiry into a religious and cultural movement that has intersected with the histories of science, technology, medicine, politics, and art.
“However uncomfortable, it’s undeniable that Spiritualism is at a crossroads of modern Western culture,” Taggart said. “Its influence echoes in and connects to the history of science, medicine, technology, politics, and art.”
Originating in the mid-nineteenth century, Spiritualism emerged during a period of rapid technological and scientific change. New forms of communication—including the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, and photography—reshaped how people thought about presence, absence, transmission, and the possibility of contact beyond ordinary perception. Within that context, séances and spirit communication became part of a broader cultural imagination shaped by modern media.
“Spiritualism was the first religion to create an iconography using the new medium of photography,” Taggart said. “You could say that spiritualism is to photography as Catholicism is to painting.”
The connection between Spiritualism and photography became Taggart’s main focus. After an early personal experience with a medium led her to take questions of spirit communication more seriously, she began closely documenting séance practices, including phenomena such as ectoplasm, a substance described by practitioners as both material and immaterial. Through some strange, coincidental “accidents,” she learned to capture both the seen and the unseen through her lens.
This research led to her book Séance (Fulger Press, 2019), one of TIME magazine’s 2019 Best Photobooks of the Year, and has also been featured by multiple international news outlets.
For Taggart, the photographic history of Spiritualism is not a historical curiosity at the margins of the medium, but a revealing archive for understanding photography itself and its entanglement with questions of evidence, illusion, and desire.
“Photography’s paranormal archive is not just fringe curiosity, but it’s really central to understanding the medium itself,” she said.
A collection of photos from photographer Shannon Taggart’s book Séance (Fulger Press, 2019), which documents her artistic exploration into Spiritualism and Spiritualist rituals.
