A woman places her hand on a charged metal plate. The technician adjusts the voltage. A flash. What emerges is not a portrait but a corona: blue-white light streaming from her fingertips, a luminous silhouette against black. Is this her aura captured on film, or something else entirely?
Aura photography and Kirlian photography are not the same thing, though the terms are often used interchangeably. Aura photography uses biofeedback sensors to translate skin conductance into colored light patterns around a subject. Kirlian photography records the actual electrical corona discharge of an object placed directly on a photographic plate under high voltage. One is a symbolic translation. The other is a physical trace.
What Each Method Actually Captures
The confusion between these two techniques has persisted since the 1970s, when New Age bookshops began offering “aura portraits” alongside Kirlian machines. The two share a visual language — halos of colored light around human forms — but they arrive at that image through entirely different processes.
Kirlian photography, named for Soviet inventor Semyon Kirlian (1898–1978), works by placing an object directly on a photographic plate connected to a high-frequency, high-voltage generator. When the current passes through the object, ionized gas forms a visible corona around its edges. The result is not a photograph of the object but a photograph of the electrical discharge between the object and the plate. A leaf, a coin, a fingertip — each produces a different pattern based on moisture content, pressure, and conductivity. For a deeper look at the history and mechanism, see the glossary entry on Kirlian photography.
Aura photography, as practiced commercially today, does not use high voltage at all. The most common system, Aura Imaging developed by Guy Coggins in the 1970s, uses hand sensors that measure skin conductance, temperature, and pulse. A computer translates these readings into a color map that is then superimposed onto a Polaroid or digital photograph of the subject. The colors shift with the subject’s physiological state, but they are not recording any external energy field. They are a visualization of biometric data.
The difference is fundamental. Kirlian photography records a real physical phenomenon: the corona discharge caused by electricity passing through a gas. Aura photography records a symbolic interpretation of the subject’s nervous system activity.
Where the Two Techniques Converge and Diverge
Both methods emerged from the same cultural moment. Semyon Kirlian and his wife Valentina Kirlian began their experiments in Krasnodar, Russia in 1939, after Semyon noticed a small flash between an electrode and a patient’s skin during a medical treatment. By 1949, they had developed a reliable method for photographing the corona discharge of living tissue. Their 1958 article “Method of Obtaining Photographic Pictures of Different Types of Objects by Means of High Frequency Currents” brought the phenomenon to scientific attention.
The Kirlians believed they had discovered a way to photograph the “bioplasmic body,” a concept drawn from Soviet biologist Alexander Gurwitsch’s work on morphogenetic fields. They observed that a freshly picked leaf produced a bright, even corona, while a wilting leaf showed gaps and dim spots. When they cut a leaf in half and photographed the remaining portion, the corona still showed the outline of the missing half. This “phantom leaf effect” convinced them they were recording something beyond mere electrical discharge.
Western researchers were more skeptical. Dr. Thelma Moss of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute studied Kirlian photography in the 1970s and concluded that the variations in corona patterns could be explained by moisture, pressure, and skin conductivity alone. The phantom leaf effect, she demonstrated, was an artifact of the photographic process, residual moisture on the plate from the removed half of the leaf.
Aura photography took a different path. Guy Coggins, an electronics engineer and photographer, built his first aura imaging system in 1970 after attending a lecture on Kirlian photography. He realized that the corona discharge patterns were too variable and equipment-dependent to be reliable. Instead, he designed a system that measured the subject’s autonomic nervous system response, the same signals used in polygraph machines, and mapped them to a color wheel. Blue for calm. Red for excitement. Green for balanced. Yellow for focused.
Coggins’s system became the standard for commercial aura photography. By the 1980s, “aura portraits” were available at psychic fairs, New Age expos, and metaphysical shops across the United States and Europe. The technology has since been digitized, but the principle remains the same: sensors on the hands, a color algorithm, and a composite image.
What the Colors Mean in Each System
The color language of aura photography is consistent across most commercial systems, though the exact mapping varies by manufacturer. The standard scheme, derived from Coggins’s original work, associates each color with a psychological or emotional state.
Blue indicates calm, relaxation, and introversion. Red signals physical energy, passion, or stress. Green suggests healing, growth, and balance. Yellow points to mental activity, optimism, and clarity. Purple represents spiritual awareness or intuition. White is rare and indicates a state of high integration or transcendence.
These associations are not arbitrary. They follow the same logic as color psychology in marketing and design. Blue lowers heart rate. Red raises it. Green sits in the middle. The aura portrait is essentially a mood ring rendered as a full-body image.
Kirlian photography has no standardized color system. The colors in a Kirlian image are determined by the gas composition of the air, the voltage, the exposure time, and the type of photographic material. Argon produces blue. Neon produces red. Air produces a mix of blue and white. The same subject photographed under different conditions will produce different colors. This is why early Kirlian researchers focused on the shape and density of the corona, not its hue.
How Practitioners Use Each Technique
Aura photography is primarily a tool for self-reflection and personal insight. The practitioner asks the subject to place their hands on the sensors, then takes a photograph. The resulting image shows the subject’s body surrounded by a colored field. The practitioner interprets the colors in terms of the subject’s emotional state, energy balance, and potential blockages.
The session is interactive. The subject can see their aura change in real time as they breathe, think, or move. Some systems allow for multiple photographs in succession, showing how the aura shifts with mood or activity. The value is not diagnostic in a medical sense but reflective. It gives the subject a visual representation of their inner state, a starting point for conversation.
Kirlian photography is used differently. Because it records a physical phenomenon, it has been studied for potential medical applications. Dr. Konstantin Korotkov, a Russian physicist, developed Gas Discharge Visualization (GDV) in the 1990s as a digital evolution of Kirlian photography. His system uses a high-frequency electromagnetic field to stimulate photon and electron emissions from the skin, then analyzes the resulting patterns with software.
Korotkov’s GDV has been used in studies on acupuncture points, stress responses, and the effects of meditation. The Russian Ministry of Health approved it as a diagnostic tool in 2000. Western researchers remain divided. A 2015 review in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine found that GDV could reliably distinguish between stressed and relaxed subjects but could not identify specific medical conditions.
The Scientific Skepticism That Follows Both
Neither aura photography nor Kirlian photography has been accepted as a method for detecting or measuring a human energy field. The scientific consensus is that both techniques measure physiological phenomena that can be explained without invoking the supernatural.
For Kirlian photography, the explanation is straightforward. The corona discharge is a function of the object’s electrical properties. Moisture, pressure, and conductivity determine the pattern. A sweaty fingertip produces a brighter corona than a dry one. A leaf with intact cell walls produces a more even corona than a damaged one. The phantom leaf effect is caused by residual moisture on the plate.
For aura photography, the explanation is equally simple. The colors are a translation of skin conductance and temperature, which are controlled by the autonomic nervous system. A person who is anxious will have higher skin conductance and a different temperature profile than a person who is calm. The computer maps these differences to colors. The result is a real-time visualization of the subject’s physiological state, not a photograph of their aura.
Neither explanation rules out the existence of a human energy field. They simply say that these particular machines are not detecting one. For a broader overview of how energy fields are conceptualized across traditions, visit the auras hub.
FAQ
Can aura photography detect illness?
No. Aura photography measures skin conductance and temperature, not disease. Some practitioners use it as a conversation starter about health, but it has no diagnostic validity.
Is Kirlian photography the same as aura photography?
No. Kirlian photography records actual electrical discharge from an object under high voltage. Aura photography uses biofeedback sensors to generate a colored overlay on a photograph. The visual results look similar, but the methods and meanings are different.
Do the colors in an aura photo mean anything real?
The colors correspond to real physiological measurements, skin conductance, temperature, pulse, but the mapping to specific emotional states is arbitrary. Different systems use different color schemes.
Closing
The difference between aura photography and Kirlian photography is not just technical. It is a difference in what each technique claims to show. One records a physical trace of electricity passing through gas. The other translates the body’s nervous system activity into a color language we can read. Both invite us to ask what it means to see the invisible. For more on related concepts, explore the glossary entry on energy fields and the auras hub.