Main Image: Shannon Taggart achieves to photograph a rare display, a ‘spirit portal’ at a Kai Muegge séance, through which a guest receives a valuable gift from the spirit world and its inhabitants …
A few years ago the release of ‘Séance’ by photo-artist Shannon Taggart created a stir. Both in the world of the paranormal and in the world of art people were fascinated. Shannon had opened a forgotten window and depicted what was unfolding, a specific mainly unseen but highly influential realm of American, even global, spiritual life. Her professional eye and expertise turning her photography into real works of Art and is her secret synergy in becoming, what is now being released in its newest edition. Shannon is back in the secret and inner circles and prepares ‘Séance 2’, meanwhile the newest edition of the original ‘Séance’ became totally reedited with a new publisher bringing many different powerful new visual and content-related aspects into the actual edition, turning it for every lover of the original into a ‘must-have’!
Photo 1: Here we have drawn a line that you can see better the lady kneeling in front of the open cabinet with the medium in it.
‘Kai!?’, I met Shannon newly at a conference, ‘I wanna show you a photo I took’. Shannon turned her PC over to me. I met Shannon 2012 for the first time. From the start we had a productive and friendly relationship that lasts to this day. She regularly took photos in my private experimental sessions, and these images – I regularly considered them astounding – gave me ways to glance onto visualizations of my own mediumship from the outside!
‘What do you see?’ On her screen an image popped up showing a scene from a workshop class from the conference we were attending. A lady, an attendee training, sitting in a cabinet. Then as if overwhelming my vision, with a mythical power a strange mystical entity overtook the images center. It stood oversized and dangerous and irritating to the left like a dark messenger -reminding of a massive animal, its facial features unnaturally out of proportion. Shannons photography at this stage is entering planes and spaces of reality like parallel dimensional versions of how we see the world normally. Objects and even persons in the photos then turn into archetypical symbolism, like reality, but seen through a code, a meaningful filter set by some kind of meta-photographer, acting through Taggarts photography. Giving us access to other realms existing parallel to or within ours.
Her work after years of pursuing reminds of the glitches in Ted Serios photos, as if concentrating on her goal influences her photo-outcomes in a way. Ted Serios was investigated by Dr. Jules Eisenbud and was a parapsychological unicum, gifted with the ability to change the chemical
Photo 2: Morphing lights of the portal …
arrangements on photos, on Polaroids namely, psychically. Not all of Taggarts shot photos show this form of anomaly, others find their magic in between the layers of different exposure times, light influences and shutter speeds and are neither less mysterious nor less beautiful.
A lot of the palpable fascination which is coming from Taggarts rare display of Séanceroom phenomena, is transported through the sheer astonishment going on and from the right moment in time having pressed the release, like in these photos Taggart took for ‘Séance 2’ of ‘an active spirit-portal’ a sitter receives a gift through, Photo 1.
The images show the person sitting in front of the bluish portal, meanwhile everybody else is like magnetized staring into the light. In her photos, all taken under the only light influence from the bluish portal, Shannon as well caught the strange stages of morphing of the light of the anomaly, shown in Photo 2.
A strange malformed hand was also a direct
Photo 3: Another artifact, one of the hands, this time malformed, that turn up in Kai Muegge Séances traditionally …
phenomenal artifact caught by Taggarts lense, Photo 3.
Photography of partially fully lighted paranormal phenomena is also not at all an only marginal topic in Taggarts upcoming next book about the half of a century existing American experimental group for macro-pk phenomena ‘SORRAT’, another very special gem lovers of the genre can look forward to!
