Picturing Aura: A Visual Biography
Jeremy Stolow
Picturing Aura is the first book of its kind: an extended historical, anthropological, and philosophical study of modern efforts to visualize the hidden radiant force encompassing the living body known as our aura. This interdisciplinary study chronicles the rise and global spread of modern instruments and techniques of picturing aura, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, focusing especially on Kirlian photography: a cameraless photographic technique originally developed in the context of Soviet parapsychology research that eventually played a major role in diverse realms of psychical research, esotericism, art photography, popular culture, and the New Age alternative medical and spiritual marketplace. At their core, pictures of auras are boundary objects that operate simultaneously in multiple conceptual and practical realms, serving varying goals of making art, healing bodies, and exploring the cosmos. Drawing on extensive archival as well as field research, this book reconstructs a global history of this boundary-crossing enterprise through its evolving media technologies, markets, and cultural arenas. It is a story shaped through exchanges among professionals and amateurs, scientists and occultists, countercultural artists and entrepreneurs, metropolitans and hinterland figures. In this way, Picturing Aura brings to light a remarkable, entangled history of picture-making that challenges settled assumptions about religion, art, and science.
The MIT Press
Publication Date: April 2025
