VICEのインスタグラム(vice) - 11月1日 00時50分

Photographer Shannon Taggart's new book explores the lives and beliefs of Spiritualists around the world, ectoplasm included.⁠
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When photographer Shannon Taggart was 16, her cousin visited Lily Dale, the hamlet in New York State, where she met a medium and was told an unsettling story about the circumstances of their late grandfather’s death. A decade later in 2001, Taggart, then working as a photojournalist, returned to Lily Dale, thinking that her trip would be a project about the religion. ⁠
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“That first summer [in 2001], the Spiritualists at Lily Dale taught me their history, which was shocking because I found out Spiritualism was deeply involved with the women's rights movement, and was a vehicle to help progressive politics like marriage reform and abolition. Then I found out about spirit photography, which was truly shocking to me – I had no idea that Spiritualism had this photographic history, that it was really the first religion to use photography in an iconographic way.⁠
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“The stereotype when I first went to Lily Dale was, ‘you're going to meet a bunch of charlatans tricking people for money’, and that really is not what I encountered. I encountered sincere practitioners and saw a lot of sincere exchanges about weird human experiences, and I was really compelled by it,” she told VICE. ⁠
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Ultimately, Taggart spent 20 years traveling and meeting with Spiritualists, in a personal quest to unpack the “boondoggle” of ectoplasm, a physical white substance said to ooze from mediums during séances. “Lily Dale changed everything about my photographic practice,” she says, “it changed my approach to everything.”

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