Welcome back to the Ghost Bunny podcast. I'm your host, Bridget Marquart, with a brand new episode for you guys.

My guest today is Shannon Taggart. Shannon is a photo-based artist and independent researcher known for exploring how photography can navigate boundaries between the scene and the unseen.

Her varied creative projects address the intersection of art, anthropology, and the supernatural.

Her work has been exhibited internationally and featured by CNN Style, Book Forum, New York Times, T-style magazine, financial times, lens culture, LeMonde, Washington Post, and the Paris Review, among others.

Her first book, Seance, offers a series of haunting photographs exploring spiritualist

practices in the U.S., England, and Europe.

Supported with a commentary on her experiences, a forward by Dan Aykroyd, creator of Ghostbusters

and fourth generation spiritualists, Seance examines spiritualism's relationship with human

celebrity and its connection

with technology, and it concludes with the debate over ectoplasm and how spiritualism can move

forward in the 21st century. Seance was named one of Time Magazine's best photo books of 2019,

and she has spoken at venues, including the Yale School of Art, the Gallery of Everything, and the Walker Art Center.

She hosts an annual summer symposium in Lilydale, New York, and is currently working on an illustrated book about the Society for Research on Report and Telekinesis, Saurat, one of the strangest cases in the history of parapsychology.

Shannon became aware of spiritualism as a teenager

when her cousin received a message from a medium that revealed details about her grandfather's death.

In 2001, while working as a photojournalist, she began photographing where the message was received

in Lilydale, New York, home to the world's largest spiritual community. Taggart expected to spend

one summer figuring out the tricks of the spiritualist trade.

Instead, spiritualism's mysterious processes, earnest practitioners, and neglected photographic history

became an inspiration.

Her project evolved into an 18-year journey that has taken her around the world in search

of ectoplasm, the elusive substance that is said to be both

...