Shannon Taggart American, b. 1975

Shannon Taggart is an American photographer and author based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Trained as a documentary photographer, she first encountered Spiritualism through a personal connection: a family member's experience with a medium that she could not easily dismiss. This led her to Lily Dale, New York, the world's largest Spiritualist community, where her first encounter with spirit photography at the local museum stopped her cold. Images absent from every photo history book she had studied, yet charged with grief, love, and longing, she found in them an entire overlooked visual tradition. What began as curiosity became a twenty-year immersion in Spiritualist communities across the United States, England, and Europe.

Her work documents séance circles, trance states, ectoplasm, and the many technologies, from Ouija boards to motion sensors, that Spiritualists have developed in their pursuit of contact with the dead. In doing so, Taggart inscribes herself in a long lineage of women at the crossroads of art and Spiritualism. From the Bangs Sisters, whose precipitated spirit paintings astonished the late nineteenth century, to the countless female mediums who used automatic drawing and writing as creative and spiritual acts, women have always occupied a central place in Spiritualist practice — both as subjects and as makers. Taggart's position within this history is that of a witness rather than a believer. She neither endorses nor dismisses what she photographs, adopting instead the stance of a participant observer: present, attentive, and rigorously neutral. It is precisely this refusal to pass judgment that gives her work its rare tension and its power.

The repercussions of her work have been felt on a global scale. Her monograph Séance (Fulgur Press, 2019) was selected among TIME magazine's Best Photobooks of the year and has since been exhibited and published internationally. Her photographs have appeared in TIME, the New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, and Discover, and her work has been recognised by Nikon, Magnum Photos, the Inge Morath Foundation, American Photography, and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace.