Later in his life, in the 1960s, on the advice of acquaintances who worked at the occult magazine Planete in Paris, he went to see his first psychic, in the countryside near Orleans. "I wanted to see what my life would be like," he explained. He recalled being nervous and feeling a little silly. "I was expecting to see someone clothed in robes with an owl on his shoulder, you know?" he said. Instead the man was wearing shorts, and in his backyard among the clucking chickens, using a pendulum as an aid, he foretold for Apraxine "all the salient points of my life -- and they all happened."
Later, after moving to New York, he regularly consulted another psychic in the West Village.
At this point in his life, Apraxine said, he feels that many of his curiosities about otherworldly things have been satisfied, or have at least gone into hibernation for a while. He reads less about the occult and hasn't seen a psychic in years. Or, for that matter, a ghost. In many ways, he said, the Met exhibition did not develop as an outgrowth of his interests. It simply became another way of working through them, an exploration he hopes that people who see the show may want to take, too.
"I thought, `Maybe I will learn something by delving more deeply into this subject,"' he said.
The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street, Sept. 27 through Dec. 31.
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