Shannon Taggart, along with mediums from Lilydale, will be giving a presentation on Spiritualism and her photography.

Shannon Taggart began photographing Spiritualistic activity in 2001 in LilyDale, New York, the world's largest Spirtiualistic community. Taggart, without haste, immersed herself within the community by getting readings, experiencing healings, joining séances, attending a psychic college, and sitting in a medium's cabinet, all with her camera. With intentions only to stay one summer figuring out the tricks of the Spiritualist trade, she stumbled upon a hidden world and abandoned system with a storied history that became a resource and an inspiration for her own photographic theory and practice.

Photography and Spiritualism have an intrinsic relationship. Photography’s ability to trace the reflection and preserve time directly links it to mortality, Spiritualism’s main concern. Both originated in the mid-nineteenth-century and were popularized in the same city, Rochester, NY. Each has used the other as a tool to understand its own objective limitations and subjective complications. Photography itself is a paradox, both art, and science, it serves each without the ability to leave the other untainted. The intersection between Spiritualism and photography is a place where many opposites meet, mind and matter, heaven and earth, art and science, life and death. Taggart's pictures are meant as meditations on this riddle of liminality and the magic of the photographic process. These photographs are an effort to manifest the unseen through images that contain both mechanical and spiritual explanations, requiring interpretation.