Spiritualism was born in nineteenth-century America at the precise historical moment photography was invented. This coincidence is far from accidental. Both practices promised access to the invisible. Both were celebrated as instruments of truth and condemned as theaters of illusion. Both use the word "medium" to describe their role as intermediaries. The photographs gathered here inhabit that charged overlap, where the darkroom and the séance room become versions of the same place.
This reading room will provide further insight into Shannon Taggart’s 20-year investigation of Spiritualist photography. It is organized into six chapters, each approaching a different dimension of this world: the land where Spiritualism took root, the body of the medium, the collective ritual of the séance circle, the contested materiality of ectoplasm, the objects and artefacts Spiritualism has produced, and the long, strange entanglement of the movement with technology and photography.