Shannon Taggart: Séance

Named one of one of Time’s best photobooks of 2019, this portrait of spiritualist communities across the US and Europe is now redesigned with additional archival images.

American photographer Shannon Taggart’s fascination with spiritualism, the belief in deceased individuals’ ability to communicate with the living, began during her adolescence when a medium revealed additional information about the circumstances of Taggart’s grandfather’s death. A decade later, Taggart, then a practicing photojournalist, found herself obsessively drawn to Lily Dale, New York―the world’s largest spiritualist community. Her transformative experiences there catalyzed an 18-year odyssey documenting spiritualist communities throughout the world in search of “ectoplasm”―an emanation exorcised from the body of the medium, believed to be both spiritual and material.