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 aims to 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.
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I. The Land
Place, Landscape, and the Geography of BeliefSpiritualism is inseparable from the places where it took root. These are not incidental locations: they are charged landscapes, chosen and shaped by the belief systems that inhabit them.
Lily Dale, New York, the world's largest Spiritualist community, sits on the shores of Lake Cassadaga, a name derived from the Seneca word for "water beneath the rocks." Local maps show Indian burial mounds and possible ceremonial grounds bordering the upper lake, and Spiritualists have long spoken of water as a conductor of psychic energy. The region sits close to Lakes Erie and Ontario and to Niagara Falls, and has produced a remarkable number of famous mediums. Some attribute this to something in the water itself.
Montcabirol, in the foothills of the French Pyrenees, sits in the heart of Cathar country: a landscape long associated with heresy, mysticism, and the persistence of hidden belief.
Arthur Findlay College in Essex, England, occupies a building whose architecture was designed to mirror the calendar year: 365 windows for the days, 52 chimneys for the weeks, 4 staircases for the seasons.
These are not neutral spaces. They are environments constructed, materially and symbolically, to support the belief that the boundary between the living and the dead can be crossed.
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A lone swan illuminated against the dark water of Lake Cassadaga. Peaceful and strange in equal measure, the image introduces the particular atmosphere of Lily Dale: a community that exists, as Taggart has described it, slightly outside of ordinary time. The lake's Seneca name, meaning "water beneath the rocks," connects this place to a pre-Spiritualist history of indigenous ceremony and spiritual practice. The swan, traditionally a symbol of passage between worlds, seems entirely at home.
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Stansted Hall, Arthur Findlay College for the advancement of spiritualism and psychic science, Essex, UK, 2003
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Outside Room 215, Arthur Findlay College, UK, 2012
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II. The Medium
Portraits of trance, transformation, and altered statesThe medium is the central figure of Spiritualism: the human instrument through which communication with the dead is said to pass. Mediumship, Spiritualists insist, is not a gift exclusive to a chosen few. It is a capacity latent in all human beings, developed through practice, discipline, and above all, trust. Trust in what comes through, however strange, however apparently impossible.
In trance, the medium's face transforms. Their posture shifts, their voice changes, their body becomes available to other presences. These portraits attempt to document that threshold state: the moment when, according to Spiritualist belief, a human body becomes a conduit between worlds. Taggart photographed these transformations at close range, in darkness, under red light and ultraviolet light, with long exposures and fast ones, always aware that the camera itself is implicated in what it records.
Many mediums first came to their practice through grief or trauma: experiences that, as one medium described it, "broke them open" and revealed capacities they had not known they possessed. Others trained methodically, developing their abilities over years under the guidance of teachers. What nearly all of them share is the conviction articulated by Lily Dale's executive director Susan Glasier: "We all have mediumship inside us."
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Tom Morris
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Tom Morris is one half of the Yellow Cloud Circle of Eternal Illumination, the physical mediumship partnership he has maintained for decades with Kevin Lawrenson at Montcabirol, their centre in the French Pyrenees. In trance, Tom's face changes, visited according to their practice by a rotating cast of spirit presences including Yellow Cloud, a Native American guide; Irene Simms, a trapeze artist who met her end in a lion's cage; and Phil Starr, an English drag queen whose stated mission is to "tell the gays they all go to heaven." This photograph catches Tom mid-transformation: suspended between his everyday self and whoever, or whatever, has arrived.
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Chris Howarth
Medium Chris Howarth in his medium’s cabinet, before a séance begins in his living room, UK, 2013 -
Sylvia Howarth
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Sylvia Howarth is a British medium whose practice explores trance, spirit art, and the body as a medium of inscription. She has dermatographia, a rare condition in which light scratches raise red patterns on the skin, alongside another chronic illness. She therefore leeps covered most of the time. In her séances, messages, images, and other phenomena often appear on her body without apparent cause, while ultraviolet light reveals additional patterns. The white patches visible in these photographs are a different phenomenon: one that appeared under the ultraviolet light she was projecting in her séance room. The body, for Sylvia, is itself a surface of inscription: a medium in the most literal sense.
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Gordon Garforth
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Photograph of a photograph of Gordon Garforth’s great-grandfather, UK, 2013
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III. The Séance
Circle Ritual, community, and the collective pursuit of contactThe séance circle is Spiritualism's central ritual: a group of people gathered in darkness or near-darkness, pooling their energy and their intention in the hope of reaching the dead. It is a democratic form. Anyone may sit, anyone may receive. The circle has no audience; everyone present is a participant.
These photographs document the architecture of the séance: the cabinet that accumulates energy, the circle that generates it, the trumpet that amplifies spirit voices, the table that responds to collective will. They show both the solemnity and the warmth of people who have come together around an extraordinary shared purpose. Many of those photographed came to Spiritualism through grief, drawn by the unbearable need to know that someone they loved still exists, somewhere. The séance circle offered them community, and sometimes something more.
British psychologist Kenneth Batcheldor, who conducted hundreds of séance experiments beginning in the 1960s, argued that group activities like table tipping work by quieting the rational mind and reducing fear, creating conditions in which psychic ability can emerge. He believed that playfulness and genuine expectation were essential. The circle, he suggested, is not a passive waiting room for the supernatural. It is an active, collaborative creation.
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Table Tipping
Tables have been used for spirit communication since the earliest days of Spiritualism. In the hands of mediums, they tilt, vibrate, knock out coded messages, and reportedly levitate. Researcher Walter Meyer zu Erpen has suggested that tables became the preferred instrument simply because they bring people together. This workshop photograph captures that quality: hands placed flat on the surface, collective attention directed downward, the table at the centre of a shared act of will. -
IV. Ectoplasm and Physical Phenomena
The body as a site of materializationPhysical mediumship seeks to produce objective, material evidence of the spirit world: phenomena that can be witnessed, touched, and in some cases photographed. At its most extreme, this means full materializations, the complete reproduction of a physical body emerging from the medium's cabinet and moving among the living. More commonly, it takes the form of ectoplasm: the enigmatic substance said to emanate from the medium's body, forming faces, hands, and flowing draperies before returning to its source.
Ectoplasm is described as fragile, light-sensitive, and dangerous if disrupted. Scottish medium Helen Duncan died in 1956, thirty-nine days after police stormed her séance and grabbed her mid-trance, causing what many Spiritualists believe was a fatal retraction of ectoplasm back into her body. French Nobel laureate Charles Richet coined the term in 1894, after witnessing Eusapia Palladino produce what appeared to be a phantom third arm. Asked what he had seen, Richet replied: "I never said it was possible. I only said it was true."
Spiritualists generally overlook their photographic history with ectoplasm because of its complicated relationship to evidence: images easily dismissed as fraud, yet stubbornly present. Taggart's work builds on this strange visual record, neither endorsing nor dismissing it, but taking it seriously as a body of images that speaks about grief, longing, and the desire to believe.
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Medium Kai Muegge displays ectoplasm filled with images of the dead
Basel Psi Association, Switzerland, 2018Archival pigment print
76.2 x 50.8 cm
30 x 20 in
Edition of 7 -
Medium Kai Muegge’s materialization of the spirit of Colonel Henry Steel Olcott
Basel Psi Association, Switzerland, 2018Archival pigment print
76.2 x 50.8 cm
30 x 20 in
Edition of 7
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"It's the distortion of the perception of the physical world that opens our access to another one."
Kai Muegge is one of the most documented physical mediums working today. Taggart traveled to Switzerland specifically to witness Muegge’s materializations after encountering photographs of his work. During the séance, a full materialization reportedly occurred: the spirit of Henry Steel Olcott. Afterwards, Kai told Taggart that Olcott had been drawn there by her presence, since he too had documented séances in his lifetime. As a token, Olcott left an apport—an American trade dollar dated 1873, the same year he investigated the mediums known as the Eddy Brothers.
When Taggart later showed Kai the photographs she had made, he responded with characteristic frankness. “Shannon, it was literally a mediumistic preterm birth,” he said. He explained that what he described as a “weak mediumistic performance” had resulted from the pressure he felt to produce phenomena during the session. “Too much pressure to perform was put on my trance-state. I have screwed it up, because I so very much wanted it to happen. I gave birth to an incomplete creation.”
The substance visible in the séance room—luminous, dense, and seemingly emerging from his body—is what Spiritualists call ectoplasm: the material form that spirit energy is believed to assume when it crosses into the physical world. Within this shifting substance, sitters have reported recognizing the faces of deceased loved ones. For Kai, the séance room functions as a laboratory of perception. “It’s the distortion of the perception of the physical world,” he explains, “that opens our access to another one.”
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Shannon TaggartMedium Sharon Harvey’s spirit team show a mask, London, UK, 2013
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This is the accidental photograph that changed the course of the project. Made during one of medium Patricia Price's Thursday night séance circles, it began as an attempt at a straightforward documentary image: a woman holding a red flashlight in the dark. But as the group meditated, every other person in the room reported seeing a second face floating peacefully beside her, similar to hers yet slightly different. Voices called out: "It's her grandmother." "Her doppelgänger." "Marie Laveau." Taggart strained to see it and could not. She saw only a woman with a flashlight, and made the most direct photograph she could.
When she developed the film, the frame contained exactly two faces, just as the others had described. The accidental image turned out to be more psychologically true to the event than the one she had intended to take. Her shutter had created the perfect metaphor for something she could not see herself. It was, she has said, the moment she understood what the project was really about: not whether the invisible exists, but what it means to be in a room where others can see something you cannot.
Woman said to be overshadowed by either the spirit of her grandmother, the Voodoo priestess Marie Laveau, or her own doppelgänger. Lily Dale, NY, USA, 2003
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V. Objects and Artefacts
The material culture of SpiritualismSpiritualism has always produced objects.
- Medium's cabinets
- Instruments of communication: planchettes, trumpets, Ouija boards, ghost boxes
- Tokens of contact: apports delivered from the spirit world, a bent spoon, a trade dollar, a live canary
- Traces of presence: ectoplasmic masks recorded on film, precipitated paintings produced by entranced hands, Kirlian auras of the living and the dead.
These photographs treat the artefacts of mediumship with the same attention a still-life photographer might bring to a skull or a flower: as charged, resonant things that carry meaning beyond their physical form. Spiritualism was the first religion to create its iconography through photography rather than painting.
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Medium's Cabinets
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The parallels between the medium's cabinet and the photographic darkroom are not metaphorical. They are structural.
The medium's cabinet is the most architecturally significant object in the material culture of Spiritualism. At its simplest, it is an enclosed space: curtains hung across a corner, panels of black fabric stretched over a frame, or a purpose-built box large enough to contain a seated person. Its function is to concentrate and incubate the energy necessary for physical phenomena to occur. Ectoplasm, fragile and light-sensitive, requires darkness and containment. The cabinet provides both.
The first medium's cabinet appeared in 1856, during the performances of brothers Ira and William Davenport, Spiritualists from Buffalo, New York, who attributed its design to the spirit of a pirate named John King. Its probable precursor is considerably older: the Native American shaking tent, a covered structure used to invoke spirit guidance, whose ceremonial sequence corresponds closely to the unfolding of a séance.
Each cabinet in this exhibition is a bespoke solution to the same problem: how to create, in an ordinary domestic space, the conditions under which the boundary between the living and the dead might become permeable. Chris Howarth's is a temporary construction of canvas and tape, assembled and dismantled for each session. Sharon Harvey's is built from black fabric stretched over a skeleton of copper water pipes, designed by her plumber, who is himself a Spiritualist. Gordon Higginson's, still at Arthur Findlay College, carries the weight of a history: when Taggart's class was told they would be using it, a charge went through the room.
The cabinet is also a threshold object in the history of photography. The dark chamber, the concentrated energy, the emergence of something previously invisible: the parallels with the photographic darkroom are not metaphorical. They are structural.
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Apport Gifts
Bent spoon apport gift from medium Anders Åkesson, UK, 2013 -
Apported canary, Montcabirol Center for Physical Mediumship, France, 2014
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Medium Mychael Shane produces gemstone apports from his mouth and eyes while being held by his assistant, Cynthia Singer, and host, Dr Neal Rzepkowski,Tiomimé, NY, USA, 2016
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Séance Trumpets
A séance trumpet is a cone, usually aluminium or cardboard, believed to amplify sounds made by spirits, who use ectoplasm to create a voice box inside the narrow end and project their voices through the other. Sylvia Howarth has hand-painted these examples with portraits of the celebrity spirits most popular in contemporary Spiritualism: Michael Jackson, Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, Louis Armstrong, Quentin Crisp, and Freddie Mercury. The objects occupy an improbable space between religious artefact and folk art.
Séance trumpets with celebrity spirit guides, hand-painted by medium Sylvia Howarth, UK, 2013
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Planchette & Ouija
Automatic writing experiment using a planchette, Arthur Findlay College, UK, 2012 -
Bell Jars
Glass dome exercise, inspired by the Scole Experiment, Arthur Findlay College, UK, 2012 -
VI. Technology and the Invisible
Photography, electricity, and the tools of contactSpiritualism and photography have been entangled since their simultaneous emergence in the mid-nineteenth century. Both disciplines promised access to forces beyond ordinary human perception, and both were immediately caught up in questions of truth, evidence, and belief. Spirit photographers claimed their cameras could record presences invisible to the naked eye. Skeptics insisted they were producing nothing but darkroom trickery. The argument was never resolved. It is still not resolved.
The technologies deployed in this chapter span nearly two centuries: from the earliest electrographic experiments of the 1800s to today's digital orb photography, from Kirlian auras to Microsoft Xbox motion sensors. What connects them is a single persistent impulse, to use the tools of the present moment to capture evidence of what lies beyond. And underlying all of them is the same intuition that has haunted both Spiritualism and photography from the beginning: that the camera might finally be the instrument that closes the distance between the living and the dead.
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Sylvia Howarth built a camera obscura inside her bedroom, cutting a tiny hole in the window shade so that the outdoor scene projected onto the walls and ceiling of the darkened room. In séance mode, Sylvia enters a trance while sitters watch the moving images. She reports using the device for time travel, receiving visions of future developments in transportation, technology, and artificial intelligence. The camera obscura is one of photography's oldest ancestors, and here it becomes, in Sylvia's hands, a technology for crossing not just space but time.
Medium Sylvia Howarth’s bedroom, transformed into a camera obscura séance room, with doll, UK, 2013
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Kirlian Camera
Kirlian corona on my mother’s fingertip, three years before her death, Assembly Hall, Lily Dale, NY, USA, 2014 -
Instrumental Transcommunication (ITC)
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Medium Annette Rodgers participates in a direct radio voice experiment led by medium and tutor Kim Moore-Cullen, in a circle that includes other bereaved parents
Arthur Findlay College, UK, 2018Annette Rodgers hosts a weekly circle at her home in Spain, where her group reports contact with deceased scientists including Wilhelm Reich, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Stephen Hawking, and Albert Einstein. Here she participates in a direct radio voice experiment, using the static and signal fragments of a live radio tuner as a substrate through which spirit voices are believed to speak. The circle includes other bereaved parents. For many of them, the experiment is not a curiosity but a lifeline.
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Naomi Barbar listens for spirit messages from a “ghost box"
Lily Dale, NY, USA, 2015The "ghost box" — or "Frank's box," named after inventor Frank Sumption — is an ITC device that sweeps live audio from an AM or FM tuner. The random fragments it emits — music clips, DJ voices, white noise — are believed to enable conversation with spirits, like a radio-wave Ouija board. In sessions, the box is placed in the center of the circle or passed around as people take turns asking it questions. On several occasions I've heard it respond with a correct answer, which I found genuinely unsettling.
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Instrumental transcommunication experiment —Sylvia Howarth using the Xbox Kinect camera for spirit communication
UK, 2018Instrumental transcommunication, or ITC, refers to the use of electronic devices as conduits for spirit contact. In this experiment, Sylvia Howarth merges gaming technology with mediumship, using a Microsoft Xbox Kinect motion sensor to track her body while in a trance state. Once the sensor has established her physical presence, Sylvia sets her intention and invites a present spirit to move the sensor independently, without attaching to her own motion. Here, she asks a spirit to shake hands with fellow sitter Donna Sinclair Hogan. The gesture is both intimate and uncanny: a handshake offered across an invisible threshold, mediated by a piece of consumer electronics designed for living room entertainment. The Kinect, a device built to read the body in space, becomes in Sylvia's hands an instrument for detecting a body that no longer occupies space at all.
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Medium Lillian Stavang Gaarden sits under the Lucia N°03 hypnagogic light machine
Arthur Findlay College, UK, 2012The Lucia N°03 was developed by Austrian psychiatrist Dr Engelbert Winkler, who sought to recreate the lights he had experienced during a near-death experience at the age of seven. Co-designed with neurologist Dr Dirk Proeckl and engineer Jury Locke, the device passes a precisely calibrated stroboscopic light through closed eyelids, inducing a hypnagogic state that users describe as an out-of-body experience, or a passage into another realm entirely.
Lillian Stavang Gaarden, the Norwegian medium and healer photographed here, shares something essential with the machine's inventor: she too had a transformative near-death experience as a child. At four years old, gravely ill and unable to move, she says a spirit entered her room and drew the illness out of her body, healing her instantly and, she believes, initiating her as a healer at the same moment.
The photograph is one of the quietest in the series, and one of the most unsettling. Lillian sits in stillness beneath a light that is doing something to her that cannot be seen. The Lucia, like the séance room, like the darkroom, works from the inside out.
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