Dear Shannon (Séance)
spirit photography, and a brand new track
Dear Shannon,
Hope this finds you really well and thanks again for the interview in 2019. It’s stayed with me, not least because something alarming happened straight after. I’ve considered emailing you to tell you about this anecdote before, but it’s always seemed too strange, too intense for a private email — a public one which you’ll probably never read seems a better fit.
We’d been talking about your book Séance, the spirit photography tradition, people searching for meaning in the meaningless, and messages arriving from other worlds. I hung up our call, and my phone rang — a number I didn’t have saved. When I picked up, the male voice was already mid-sentence.
Later, I found out I wasn’t the only person the guy rang (how did he get my number? Had I given it to him on one of the two nights we’d previously met? Was it the time he said he believed in The Matrix and I couldn’t tell if he was joking?) Later, I learned he had been sermonising to anyone who would listen. He had taken to roaming the streets at night. He would bang on the doors of vague acquaintances, and he had even gone into the café where I worked looking for me.
At the time, all I had was the monologue, an unsettling, sometimes funny, hurried stream of phrases. Clear that he was in the middle of a psychotic episode, I stayed on the phone, out of morbid curiosity. There was also something compelling about the mangled syntax, the puns, the velocity.
The ethics of this, I know, are not great, but during lockdown I used some of his phrases as inspiration for a poem and collaged bits and pieces together with lines from our interview. Just as your book is loosely organised around the search for ectoplasm — a substance that exudes from the body of a medium during a spiritualistic trance and forms the material for the manifestation of spirits — there was something trance-like, maybe even ectoplasmic, about this phone call. I couldn’t resist it as material. Neither could Jack, who wrote music to go with my lines.
Earlier this month, I was talking about your photo book with the artist Andra Ursuta, whose exhibition Joy Revision included works ‘created with photoreactive dye on plush velvet,’ as I wrote in Plinth: ‘rays of light around the skull conjure ritual headdresses, religious haloes or visionary third eyes.’ This effect that was created ‘purely by accident’. She had no idea how flashing light on the skeleton in a spiny wicker chair would turn out.
You could call the works in Joy Revision spirit photographs, and — as you well know is so often the case — they were made in response to deep bereavement. ‘My partner passed away at the end of 2020, completely unexpectedly. And when that happens, your brain just goes crazy,’ Ursuta said. ‘When I was making these works, maybe part of this openness I was looking for was also because I was hoping that one of them would really feel like a sign.’
Yes, and what would that sign really feel like?
We can all relate to loss, and it’s perhaps more difficult to describe, but I think the futile search itself is relatable too. ‘Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.’ Something elusive, hopeful and light is what makes me keep writing, I suspect, especially if ‘Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.’
Not unlike a medium, then — I always liked the idea that one of your Spiritualist friends had said your photography practice was like a mediumship.
I don’t know what happens to signs when you’re experiencing psychosis, whether they slip away from their referents, but, after a few days of looking over my shoulder, this guy did eventually find me. I was in a pub when he spotted me through the window and pointed. The next moment, he had burst through the doors. Before I could get to my feet, he was down on one knee. He kissed my hand in greeting, his hair dripping with rain. Not far behind was his father, over from Germany, to try and manage the situation.
‘He’s such a thespian,’ the dad said, shaking off an umbrella. ‘Come on, son.’
With these variously sad, campy, and unsettling searches for lost loved ones fresh in my mind, Jack and I returned to our song, titled ‘Séance’ after your book. All credit to Jack for the mix. imho, ectoplasm has never sounded so cool.
Happy halloween!
All best wishes,
Sammi
Brilliant, beautiful, uncanny (these words and the song) xx