We're Glowing Over Energy Field Photography

Aura photography attempts to flip the script on “I’ll believe it when I see it."

by Lisa Burek

November 28, 2015, 1:10pm

All images courtesy Radiant Human

Inside a large, collapsible white dome with a black interior, a curious box connected to two metal plates sits in front of a chair. The box is an Aura Camera, a device Christina Lonsdale of Radiant Human uses to capture her subjects’ energy fields‒blurry, colorful halos that surround the head of the photographed person. “An aura is not only who you are physically, but also energetically," Lonsdale tells The Creators Project. In the parapsychological world, these halos are thought of as the visible version of a person’s otherwise invisible life force, a.k.a., an aura.

The Radiant Human dome

These days, aura photography’s taken a trendy turn. The result of a session at Radiant Human is a personal portrait in the form of a Polaroid picture featuring the portrayed person surrounded by what looks like a colorful, blurry Instagram filter. "I like that it’s film. It’s tactile and it’s one-of-a-kind, which is pretty old school. And I like that it develops instantly and the camera basically performs like an interactive filter, which is so new school. That dichotomy provides a tension that I find really inspiring,” Christina continues. The second aura photography location opened in New York this past summer, and already, tourists are flocking to have their auras captured.

Though the trend of aura photography seems to have emerged out of the ether, photographing energy fields has quite a long history. In fact, attempts to capture magnetic fields with photographic plates go as far back as the 1890s. It wasn’t until 1939 that Russian engineer Semyon Kirlian developed a precise technique—by accident. Kirlian captured his first images of energy fields during experiments with conducting plates attached to living things.

For several years after Kirlian’s experiments, there was a lull in energy field photography that lasted until the 1970’s. Inspired by Kirlian’s work, Guy Coggins pushed energy field photography a step further with his Aura Camera (an early version of the camera used in Radiant Human’s photography). Coggins is still at it today, running a company called Aura Imaging, and, as is any entrepreneur’s tendency, is expanding the scope of his product. "We are a development company. I am working with 3D aura imaging, and we plan on making an aura system that will allow the viewer to see their aura from the inside. That is, to see the energy field projecting away from the viewer," he tells The Creators Project.

Aura photography rides the line between art and spirituality. The colorful photos are said by aura readers to reveal information about the personality of the person photographed. Lonsdale explains: “Each photo has three sections that most aura photographers pay attention to; everything from the ears up represents conscious thought (and typically, in my opinion, these colors change faster than in other areas), whereas the lower left represents what is your internal dynamic–or self‒and the lower right represents what you project outwardly‒your persona.” Photographer Van de Roer has even taken on capturing the auras of artists as the basis of his series, Portrait Machine Project.

But perhaps the science and interpretation of auras are not the most important parts of aura photography. We asked Christina Lonsdale whether aura photography’s value lies in your reading, or in the artform itself. She believes, "It’s all about perspective, which really means it doesn't matter what I think, it’s about you and the experience, it’s about the searching, and who or what is at the other end of that echo."