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 pictures 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 aura 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 upon 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.