In this guide

A woman places her palms on two metal plates. A Polaroid camera flashes once. Minutes later, an image slides out showing her silhouette wrapped in layers of blue, violet, and a thin rind of orange. She is seeing what the camera claims is her aura, the luminous energy field that occult traditions have described for centuries but that no human eye has ever confirmed. Aura photography is a process that uses biofeedback sensors to measure skin conductance and temperature, translating those readings into a color overlay that appears around the subject’s body in the final image. The machine does not photograph an invisible energy field. It creates a visual representation based on physiological data, mapped through a fixed interpretive system.

What is aura photography?

What is aura photography

The practice sits at an awkward intersection of technology, spirituality, and commerce. It claims to make the invisible visible. What it actually makes is a Polaroid that tells a story about the person in the frame, one that feels true enough to have kept the machines running for over fifty years.

Where Did Aura Photography Come From?

Aura photography descends from the work of Semyon Kirlian, who in 1939 discovered that objects placed in a high-frequency electrical field produce a visible corona on photographic plates. The technique was adapted in the 1970s by Guy Coggins, whose ‘Aura Camera’ used biofeedback sensors to translate skin conductivity into a colored image. The practice has always sat at an awkward intersection of technology and spirituality — and that tension is part of its appeal.

The history of aura photography

The story begins not with a mystic but with a scientist. In 1939, Soviet electrician Semyon Kirlian noticed that an object placed on a photographic plate connected to a high-voltage source produced a coronating discharge on the film. Leaves, coins, and fingers all appeared surrounded by a jagged halo of light. Kirlian believed he had photographed the life force itself, the “bioenergetic aura.” He spent decades developing the technique, and by the 1960s, Soviet researchers were using it to study plant health and metal fatigue.

How the aura camera works

Kirlian photography is not the same thing as aura photography, though the two are often confused. Kirlian images record an electrical corona discharge caused by moisture and surface conductivity. They require direct contact with the photographic plate and a strong electromagnetic field. The result is dramatic, spiky, and unpredictable. But nobody in the Kirlian tradition ever produced a color-coded portrait with labeled chakras.

That step came in 1970, when American inventor Guy Coggins filed a patent for the “AuraCam 3000.” Coggins combined a Polaroid camera with two hand plates that measured galvanic skin response and skin temperature. A small internal circuit translated the biometric readings into a color assignment. The subject’s palms sat on the sensors, the camera flashed, and within sixty seconds the machine printed a picture with a colored halo around the head and shoulders. Coggins debuted the AuraCam at the 1970 Whole Earth Festival in Los Angeles. It won an Academy Award for technical achievement in 1976, not for its occult claims but for the engineering of its Polaroid integration.

Coggins was not a mystic. He was an inventor who saw a market. The AuraCam succeeded because it gave people a tangible object that matched what they already believed about themselves. The colors became a vocabulary.

How the Machine Decides What You See

The hand plates measure two things: skin conductance (how easily electricity passes through the skin, which changes with sweat and emotional arousal) and skin temperature. These readings vary from person to person and moment to moment. A nervous person produces different data than a calm one. A person who just drank coffee produces different data than someone who just meditated.

The camera’s circuit assigns a color or combination of colors based on those numbers. Coggins used a simple mapping system. High conductance with low temperature might read as green. Low conductance with high temperature might read as blue. The system has no fixed standard across manufacturers. A red aura on one machine can mean passion. On another, it can mean inflammation. The interpretation depends on the color map the company programmed into the circuit.

The image itself is a double exposure. The camera takes a standard Polaroid portrait of the subject, then adds a second exposure of colored light that projects through a mask shaped to the body’s outline. The result is a layered image: a photograph of a person with a translucent colored cloud painted around them by the machine.

The technology has moved from analog to digital. Modern aura cameras use webcams and software instead of Polaroid film. The hand sensors plug into a laptop. The software maps the readings to a color palette and composites the aura layer onto the video feed in real time. The underlying logic has not changed since 1970. The machine measures the body and paints the result.

What the Aura Is Supposed to Mean

In the tradition behind the cameras, the aura is the luminous field said to surround every living being, carrying the state of the body, mind, and emotions. The colors are read as indicators: red for energy and passion, blue for calm and communication, green for healing, and so on. The photograph is understood not as a literal image of the field but as a translation of it — a snapshot of the subject’s energetic state at the moment of exposure.

Aura photography color meanings

The colors in aura photography draw on a symbolic language that predates the camera by decades. The theosophical tradition of the late nineteenth century, particularly the work of Charles W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant, described the aura as a series of concentric colored layers corresponding to physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual states. Leadbeater’s 1902 book Man Visible and Invisible included hand-painted plates showing the auras of a “spiritually developed man” (gold and blue) versus a “savage” (muddy red and brown), a racist framework that the modern aura industry has quietly abandoned while keeping the color system.

The basic color map used in most aura photography studios runs something like this:

  • Red: physical energy, anger, or passion (context determines which)
  • Orange: creativity, confidence, or emotional intensity
  • Yellow: optimism, intellectual activity, or spiritual awakening
  • Green: healing, growth, or jealousy (again, context)
  • Blue: calm, intuition, or spiritual communication
  • Violet: transcendence, psychic sensitivity, or connection to the divine
  • White: purity, integration, or spiritual completion

No two studios use exactly the same chart. The colors in the photograph are not measurements of anything occult. They are translations of skin data into a symbolic language. The meaning comes from the interpreter, not the machine.

Practitioners read the colors as a snapshot of the subject’s current state, not a fixed diagnosis. Someone whose portrait shows heavy red and orange might be told they are under stress. Someone with blue and violet might be told they are spiritually open. The reading functions less as a scientific report and more as a prompt for self-reflection, a mirror made of colored glass.

Aura Photography Compared to Kirlian Photography

The two techniques are often confused but are not the same. Kirlian photography captures the electrical discharge of an object placed directly on the photographic plate — a corona shaped by the object’s surface and moisture. Aura photography, in the Coggins tradition, maps biofeedback data — skin temperature and conductivity — onto a colored portrait of the subject. One documents the body’s electrical field; the other interprets the subject’s emotional state.

Aura photography vs Kirlian photography

The two are routinely conflated, but they are different instruments with different inputs and different outputs.

Kirlian photography requires direct contact between the subject and the photographic plate, a high-voltage high-frequency electrical field, and a darkroom or specialized film. It produces jagged, irregular coronas that vary with moisture, pressure, and the electrical properties of the object. It has been used for everything from medical diagnostics in Soviet laboratories to ghost-hunting demonstrations at county fairs. The results are unpredictable and difficult to replicate.

Aura photography uses no high voltage. It measures skin conductance and temperature through hand sensors, then composites a predetermined color pattern onto a standard photograph. The results are consistent and repeatable. The same person can produce the same colors if their biometric readings remain stable.

Kirlian photography shows an electrical discharge. Aura photography shows a biometric reading mapped to a symbolic chart. The two share the word “aura” and little else.

What People Get Wrong About Aura Photography

The persistent error is treating aura photography as scientific proof of the aura. The technology does not photograph a subtle energy field; it visualizes measurable physiological signals through a color code. The honest position, which practitioners themselves increasingly take, is that the photograph is a symbolic portrait — a tool for reflection and self-understanding rather than a literal image of an invisible energy.

Common misconceptions about aura photography

The most common misunderstanding is that the camera captures something invisible. It does not. The camera measures skin data and assigns colors according to a programmed rule. The aura in the image is an interpretation, not a detection.

A second error is assuming that the colors mean the same thing across different machines. A red aura on a Coggins-era AuraCam does not mean the same thing as a red aura on a modern digital system. There is no universal standard. Each manufacturer sets their own mapping.

A third misconception is that the process is purely fraud. The machines do what they claim to do: they measure physiological data and produce a colored image. The question is whether that colored image corresponds to any real energy field outside the machine. The occult traditions that describe the aura as a subtle body perceptible only to trained clairvoyants have no mechanism that translates directly to a Polaroid print. The camera is not a window into the subtle world. It is a mirror that reflects what the sensors detect, then paints it in the language of the chakras.

That does not render the experience useless. Many people find that their aura photograph matches how they feel, not because the machine reads their soul but because the reading prompts them to interpret what they see. The image becomes a tool for introspection, not a diagnosis.

FAQ

Can aura photography detect illness? No. The machine measures skin conductance and temperature, not disease. Some practitioners use the colors as a conversation starter about health, but the image has no diagnostic validity.

Is aura photography the same as Kirlian photography? No. Kirlian photography records electrical corona discharge using high voltage. Aura photography measures skin data through hand sensors and composites a colored overlay onto a standard photograph.

Can you change your aura color in the photograph? Yes, because the colors depend on your physiological state at the moment of the reading. Stress, relaxation, caffeine, or deep breathing will change the skin conductance and temperature data, producing a different color assignment.

Why do people feel their aura photo is accurate even if the machine is arbitrary? The colors are broad enough that most people can find a match to their current emotional state. The reading gives the subject permission to interpret their own experience through a symbolic framework, and that act of interpretation makes the image feel true.

The aura camera does not reveal the invisible. It translates one kind of measurement into another kind of image, then lets meaning settle around it like dust. That meaning is not in the machine. It is in the person looking at the photograph and deciding what the colors say about them. The camera is a technology of reflection, not detection, and its longevity has less to do with science than with the human desire to see ourselves surrounded by something luminous. Browse our complete guide to the aura for a deeper look at the subtle body traditions that gave the colors their meaning, or explore the glossary entry on Kirlian photography for the electrical history behind the visual effect. For practitioners interested in reading auras without a machine, our guide to clairvoyant aura perception covers the traditional methods.