Photographing the Invisible – A Talk with Shannon Taggart

Harvard Divinity School

For Episode 13 of Pop Apocalypse, we welcome Shannon Taggart, an American photographer, writer, researcher, and curator known for exploring how photography can navigate boundaries between the seen and unseen. Her book, Séance (Fulger Press, 2019), offers hundreds of photographs documenting contemporary Spiritualism across the U.S. and Britain. We discuss what sparked Shannon’s interests in Spiritualism, the intersecting histories of photography and Spiritualism, ectoplasm, what inspires people to become mediums, and the techniques she developed for photographing the invisible.