Picturing Aura

The remarkable history of efforts to visualize the human aura and the lives of its pictures in religion, science, art, and culture.

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 rich, interdisciplinary study by Jeremy Stolow chronicles the rise and global spread of modern instruments and techniques of picturing aura, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, exploring how its images are put to work in the 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, Stolow 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. With more than 60 full-color illustrations, Picturing Aura brings to light a remarkable, entangled history of picture-making that challenges settled assumptions about religion, art, and science.Prologue: The Tangle
Introduction: Picturing Aura
Part One: Elements of a Practice
1 Science and Occultism: A Global Trading Zone
2 Visualizing the Subtle Body
3 Seeing and Seeing Beyond
4 Family Resemblances: The Aura’s Image Bank
5 Faith in Instruments
6 The Aura and its Trace: Electricity as a Medium of Tactile Vision
Part Two: Migration, Trade, Entanglement
7 The Hand of Narkiewicz-Jodko
8 From Center to Periphery and Back Again
9 Kirlian Photography, Cold War Parapsychology, and Groovy Science
10 DIY Clairvoyance
11 Heliographic Art
12 Harmony, Protection, Healing
13 Phantom Pictures
Epilogue
Appendix: The Aura Debunked?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index“Playful, sophisticated, and gorgeously illustrated, Picturing Aura guides us on a fascinating journey into new and ancient techniques for visualizing subtle energies.”
—John Tresch, author of The Reason for the Darkness of the Night and The Romantic Machine
 
“Beautifully illustrated, impeccably researched, and lucidly written, Picturing Aura is the single-most important resource on the subject.”
—Linda Dalrymple Henderson, author of The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art and Duchamp in Context
 
“This tour de force sheds vital new light on visual practices that  link cosmic mysteries with the materiality of human bodies.”
—Gauri Viswanathan, author of Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and BeliefJeremy Stolow is Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University, Montréal, Canada. Among his publications are the books Orthodox by Design and Deus in Machina.