I first spotted SORRAT in 2005 in the landmark exhibition of psychic photography, The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult. I was immediately struck by the group's four Instamatic prints included in the show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and reproduced in its catalog. They were unlike any séance photographs I had ever encountered. They were not murky black and white images of mediums captured in cabinets during the Victorian-era. SORRAT’s images stood out as unique visions of domestic enchantment—colorful, crisp, and oh-so-American. Their levitating TV tray and clown doll floating by a fire place transported me straight into a suburban haunted house circa 1970.
I did not anticipate that I would someday help save SORRAT’s archive of psychic media.
There is a tradition in the history of photography of established photographers saving image collections that might otherwise become lost, such as Berenice Abbott with Eugène Atget and Lee Friedlander with E. J. Bellocq. I like to think of my SORRAT endeavor as a similar mission. In 2020, the American sociologist James McClenon1 and I collaborated with SORRAT member Elaine Richards to transport the archive and begin cataloging it. I am currently working on an illustrated book about this material. It will include a text written by me telling the story of SORRAT, as well as the stories behind their story.
Some background on the project:
In 1961, the American Poet John G. Neihardt (1881-1973), best known for the book Black Elk Speaks, began directing students from the University of Missouri in experiments meant to increase scientific understanding of the paranormal. The Society for Research on Rapport and Telekinesis (SORRAT), would endure for over half a century, becoming one of the strangest cases within the history of psychical research. The group’s extraordinary claims shocked onlookers, baffled investigators, and incited scandal. SORRAT’s saga was painstakingly documented by a founding member, an aspiring science fiction writer named John Thomas Richards. The Richards archive represents a singular collection of media, including fifty years of photo albums, a complete set of original negatives, hundreds of hours of audio, thousands of letters, decades of notebooks, and telecine masters of the first purported example of “spirit cinema.”
SORRAT’s archive were created by John Thomas (Tom) Richards (1937—2015), an aspiring science fiction writer, student of John Neihardt, and group co-founder. The Richards photo albums document SORRAT’s experiments and offer a roadmap of five decades of Tom and Elaine Richards’s lives, where the paranormal was embedded in their everyday.
This post shares a sample from the album’s strange pages.
