Jeremy Stolow

This project explores the history of efforts to photograph "the aura" – a normally invisible vital energy radiating from the body – and the lives of such pictures in psychic research, alternative medicine, the New Age spiritual marketplace, and larger arenas of mass media and popular culture. Drawing upon media archaeology, science studies, religious studies, and visual culture studies, the project traces roughly 120 years of evolution of aura-imaging technologies and practices, their global circulation, and their ambiguous relationships with sanctioned techniques of scientific visualization, on the one hand, and traditions of clairvoyant perception and divination, on the other. The project’s goal is to produce a book-length account of a remarkable, and much-neglected, transnational history of non-orthodox uses of visual media, and on that basis to intervene in larger theoretical debates about what connects and distinguishes religion, techno-science, and visual culture in our contemporary, ‘post-secular’ modernity.