Aura Photography

Aura photography is the practice of photographing the claimed human aura, and its history splits into a real process and a commercial device that the entry keeps separate because they work differently. The real process is Kirlian photography: an object placed on photographic film over a conductive plate, a high-frequency voltage applied, and the corona discharge's glow captured around the object's edges, a legitimate physical phenomenon documented from the nineteenth century's electrographers and named for the repairman who rediscovered it in 1939 while fixing an electrotherapy apparatus. Its Western fame arrived with the nineteen-seventies' psychic discoveries behind the iron curtain, the Soviet research program's claims that the images showed a life force reflecting emotional and physical states, the American laboratory's parapsychology era, and the pop culture's adoption, the rock sleeves and the television credits that made the image recognizable.

The scientific record on the images is complete and specific: the streamers' length and color vary with moisture on the tissue above everything else, with pressure and humidity and oils among the dozens of parameters, the coin's discharge identical in spectrum to the fingertip's, the famous phantom leaf, the claimed image of a whole leaf from a cut one, vanishing when the imaging surface is cleaned of residual moisture. The researchers' own claims of diagnostic value were never replicated, and the physics of corona discharge accounts for everything the photographs show.

The commercial aura camera is a different machine. Invented by the California engineer in the nineteen-seventies New Age milieu and brought to market in the early eighties, the camera takes a portrait while a second exposure paints the aura's colors onto the same film, the colors generated not by any photographic process but by sensors in the hand plates measuring skin resistance, a galvanometer's reading, the same principle as the lie detector and the E-meter, mapped through a microprocessor to a color chart the inventor calibrated with clairvoyants, higher frequencies to reds and oranges, lower to blues and purples, the whole printed over the sitter's face. The reading's system maps the colors to the chakras, left side incoming energy, right side outgoing, and the anomalies, the beams and orbs, carry their own interpretations. The practice's own inventor conceded, in the skeptic's interview, that none of it is duplicatable by scientific standards, the camera's mechanism an imitation of the field rather than a photograph of one.

The aura concept's own history gave the practice its vocabulary: the Greek breeze that named the epileptic's premonition, the halos of religious art, the subtle body of the Hindu tradition, and above all the Theosophists' democratization, the occultists of the eighteen-nineties onward who made the aura something every body emits rather than a mark of saints, the clairvoyant literature's colored diagrams, and the physician's screen-gazing diagnostic claim of 1911 that the medical journals mocked. The modern market runs the practice from the psychic fair's twenty-dollar session to the touring dome of the Instagram era, the artists' projects and the Chinatown queues, the cameras themselves priced at ten thousand dollars and running on an instant film that Fuji discontinued, each shot's scarcity part of the experience's economy.

Access is open at both ends: sessions bookable by anyone, cameras purchasable by anyone. The entry's counsel is the mechanism's: the photograph shows what the sensors read, the colors are the chart's, and the aura in the picture is drawn there, not found there.