A technique of photographing the AURAS of living things. Developed by Russian scientists Semyon Davidovich Kirlian and Valentina Khrisanova Kirlian, the method is based on earlier efforts to render the supposed psychic energy fields that surround living beings visible. The Kirlians were inspired by the 19th-century work of such scientists as Karl Von Reichenbach and Walter John Kilner, a British physician who sought ways to prove the existence of the auras. Kilner discovered that if he sealed two pieces of glass together, with a small amount of a bluish dye called dicyanin in between, he had a lens that allowed him to view a kind of vaporous energy that extends from living beings. Kilner’s methods were improved on in the 20th century by Harry Boddington, among others, who found that he could accomplish the same end by using glass dyed to the same spectroscopic color as dicyanin.
In the 1940s, the Kirlians discovered that they could photograph auras (without physically seeing them) by transmitting a brief shock of high-voltage electricity through the photographic subject. The subject had to be in direct contact with photographic plates while the shock was being administered, so until recently it was only practical to photograph the supposed auras of small things most often a person’s fingertip or a small living, or recently living, aspect, such as a leaf. Early Kirlian photos were black and white, but film and equipment advances have made it possible to film the aura in color and to photograph much larger objects, without direct contact with photographic plates.