SORRAT Deep Cut

Into the Albums

I started with the photo albums: hand-crafted binders assembled over five decades, each crammed with small prints glued to cardstock and annotated in Tom’s cursive script. They map a life where the paranormal is embedded in the everyday. Birthday cakes, hospital visits, church functions, and target practice sit beside a levitating water can, a flying briefcase, or an entranced friend. The palette is candy-colored, more Easter morning than Halloween night. The cumulative effect is disarming. An impossible world is rendered in plain clarity, matter-of-fact in its weirdness. Paging through them felt like entering a bright, unguarded, open house, with every light switched on, as if there was nothing to hide.

In my recent article on SORRAT¹, I tried to convey how overwhelming it was to encounter the archive in its entirety: photographs, notebooks, spirit writings, audio recordings, VHS tapes, published books. Moving through moments recorded across different media produces a strange sensation. A scene plays differently in your head when rendered through text, image, or sound. Each form allows you to reconstruct a different dimension of the lived experience. The archive strives for completeness. It feels as though its creator, Tom Richards, meant to leave his mind to science, sealing his observations in time.

For me, the most important, and most perplexing, objects are the photo albums. They function as literal guidebooks to the SORRAT story, yet they are also collaged works of anomalous art. Beyond the images with straightforward captions that track Tom’s life, the albums contain an unruly mix of ephemera—drawings, postcards, concert tickets, poems—including nearly every greeting card he and his beloved wife, Elaine, ever exchanged. This mix of creativity, evidence, and stream of consciousness generates an intimacy that resists easy categorization. The albums invite multiple readings. As I shape the material for my book, I am still unsure what role they should ultimately play.

Here is a glimpse of what unfolds within these pages.