Touch in Photography: Kirlian, Aura, and Thought Photography

Hereward Carrington, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Photography is a medium that has leant itself to historically be attached to capturing reality. The technology has often been appropriated by the parapsychology community to give scientific legitimacy to their claims. The kind of technology used in this way often takes advantage of glitches, chemical processes, or anomalies that appear to show something paranormal. There are three related concepts in photography that were developed to attempt to capture spiritual phenomena that utilize touch: Kirlian photography, Aura photography, and thoughtography (projected thermography).

Kirlian and Aura photography are inexorably linked and hard to describe separately as they were devised for similar purposes. In the Victorian era, photography was believed to lend the photographer a clairvoyant eye for the paranormal. (Packard 2019) Franz Anton Mesmer’s 17th-century theory that all things are charged with “vital fluid” was one of the popular beliefs at the time. Many followers of Mesmerism looked to develop methods to capture this fluid, and many precursors to Kirlian and Aura photography captured this through various means such as pressing fingers and foreheads to sensitized photographic plates and experimental radiographic devices (X-ray). This experimentation would later branch off into multiple processes beyond Kirlian and Aura photography including thoughtography. In Russia, these touch-based photography experiments led scientist Jakob von Narkiewicz-Jodko to believe that electricity was capable of revealing an individual’s vital energy. The process he created involved a photosensitive material placed atop an electrically charged plate that, when pressed with a finger, would reveal a silhouette with glowing spidery legs emanating out of it. In 1939, Semyon and Valentina Kirlian, an electrical engineer and biologist respectively, independently discovered this coronal discharge using a similar process and dubbed it “Kirlian photography”. Its brilliant spectrum and colour, along with its high contrast, made it popular with a wide audience, which made it commercially appealing (Packard 2019). The Kirlians believed that this process revealed psychic insights, and this became Kirlian photography’s main usage. In the 1970s, entrepreneur Guy Coggins developed a double exposure process where an image of the subject is combined with an algorithmically defined exposure derived from the signals from plates the subject places their hands on. The result is a portrait surrounded by a colourful glow that is taken to be the subject’s “aura”.

There are two usages of “aura” that these processes relate to. In A Short History of Photography, which would later go on to be reworked in Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin purports to answer the question “What is Aura?” in the following passage:

“What is aura? A peculiar web of space and time: the unique manifestation of a distance, however near it may be. To follow, while reclining on a summer’s noon, the outline of a mountain range on the horizon or a branch, which casts its shadow on the observer until the moment or the hour partakes of their presence—this is to breathe in the aura of these mountains, of this branch."

This definition is a further described in the article, “Photography, Aura, Transmission: from Walter Benjamin to Thomas Struth, Gregory Crewdson and Carlos Goldgrub” by Ulrich Johannes Beil (translated from German), which says that the previous definition is close to the meaning of ‘Aura’, which is a breeze or shine from Antiquity. In any image, ‘Aura’ is the ineffable quality of experienced feelings captured in a “web of space and time”. In photography and other still image-objects, this quality can be literal, an experience trapped in space and time. According to Benjamin an ‘Aura’ is linked to a specific object, and criticized reproduction as affecting that quality. In Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia, she gives the effect of time and reproduction on Aura a name, Patina. This ‘Patina’ is what many people would either like to preserve or remove depending on the perception of where ‘Patina’ ends and ‘Aura’ begins–the ineffable meets the expressible. If one were to expand the usage, ‘Patina’ is what gives weight to an image in its relationship to time, space, and reproduction. It could take the form of rust, technical artifacts, unintended chemical reactions, etc. Another often usage of ‘Aura’ is to describe a person’s vital energy that reflects their personality and traits when read. When merged, this ‘Aura’ “oscillates between science and esotericism” (Beil). This opens up a new implication that Patina can as well.

In Aura photography, the unseen quality of a person is supposedly captured in what is normally seen as a technical artifact–a colourful cloud derived from touch and chemistry. This emergence of Patina and Aura in a similar plane creates an excellent illustration of the paranormal, occurrences that paranormal proponents claim is beyond scientific understanding where the tangible and intangible blend.

Thoughtography is a psychic photographic process where the subject presses their forehead onto a plate, and with the assistance of supposed psychic abilities, have their thoughts captured photographically. Unlike Kirlian and Aura photography, the process does not take advantage of any natural phenomena to legitimize its ability to capture the paranormal, but is purely the perception that one’s thoughts are being sent from inside their head to the photosensitive material. The parallel and blended relationship between ‘aura’ and ‘patina’, in addition to tactile participation of the subject, is instrumental for the appearance of thoughtography to function. The context and ritual of touching one’s head onto a plate under the impression that the subject’s thoughts are being captured is powerful. A blurry image or impression is created with an aura or mystique of a paranormal quality. The blurriness adds a superficial sense of legitimacy, as if the process has its own technical artifacts akin to a lens flare or a printing error. But what role does touch play in these photographic processes?

In Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, he outlines the psychology of causality. He defines (a) Physical Causality: pushing a vase will make it fall in the direction it was pushed, and (b) Intentional Causality: I would not perceive adding salt to my food as a series of physical movements but as an intention to add salt because the dish needs it. A major development in defining causality was made by Albert Michotte by 1945 which argued that “we see causality, just as directly as we see color,” (Kahneman 2011). I would argue this is how touch appears to legitimize these photographic processes as a parapsychological tool and that touch’s role in photography is to create the illusion of a causal connection.

Seeing causality concomitantly implies that causality can be illusory, like a visual illusion is to our sight. The link between a fingertip and an electrically charged photosensitive material appears to reveal a vitality emanating from the body in vibrance and colour and movement. The natural phenomena might be the moisture on the finger reacting with the charge to create light, similar to a plasma globe, but that is superseded by our causal sight. The ineffability of the ‘aura’ combined with the technical/mechanical creation of ‘patina’ only adds to this chain of perceived causal relationships that touch being involved creates an automatic association with intention, change, and a connection between our spirit and reality. In many ways, we do see ourselves as emanating a power through our hands that imbues and shapes the world around us with an aura– an ineffable feeling that what we see in these photographs are real.

Works cited

Beil, Ulrich Johannes. “Photography, Aura, Transmission: from Walter Benjamin to Thomas Struth, Gregory Crewdson and Carlos Goldgrub.” Edição especial: Depois de Babel, no 2, July-December 2014. pdf, accessed 15 February 2021 (Google Translate, German to English)

Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. 2001.

Kahneman, Daniel. “Norms, Surprises, Causes” Thinking, Fast and Slow. 2011.

Packard, Cassie. “The Colorful and Clairvoyant History of Aura Photography.” Artsy.net. 2019. Accessed 15 February 2021.