Capturing the unseen

PHOTOGRAPHY

Oct 30

At East London’s She Lost Control, Aura photography offers a glimpse beyond the visible. Based on Kirlian-inspired photographic techniques, these sessions capture your energy as a radiant Polaroid image—an exquisite reminder that we are more than our digital selves. ZERO.NINE founders Christian Trippe and JC Verona tried this unique experience.

Words Brenda Otero  Aura Photography/Reading Alice Briselden-Waters at She Lost Control

We’re all a little bit tired of filters, bots and AI-generated content, aren’t we? We long for something that isn’t contained in a little screen, perhaps something mysterious, intimate and beautiful that we cannot fully comprehend. That’s why we are in the back of the Broadway Market shop She Lost Control, hoping to see the invisible. As part of their Aura photography reading sessions, the SLC practitioners combine a specific photographic technique with energy reading. And we are all in for it.

Aura photography allows you to capture your personal energy with a camera lens. In 1939 Russian electrical engineer Semyon Kirlian and his biologist wife Valentina discovered that electricity could generate a halo around the body. They started experimenting, placing a hand on an electrified photographic plate, producing a glowing silhouette. This electrographic process, which registered a luminescence the Kirlians believed to be linked to the supernatural, is the basis of Aura photography. Their work became popular in the Western world during the 70s through the book Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, and led to a resurgence of Aura photography in California during the early 1980s. An engineer called Guy Coggings released a camera which will be known later as the AuraCam 600. His technique updated Kirlian’s methods with an instant film camera and plates with biodata sensors. These cameras are still used today by some US practitioners.

One of our founders, JC Verona, during the consultation before the Aura picture was taken by Alice Briselden.

“We use biometric sensors, a technology similar to the one in passport controls, to read the different acupressure points in your fingers, heart rate, sweat levels… and that converts into what we see in colours printed in Polaroid which is a nice keepsake.”

Jen Purvis, Manager SLC

She Lost Control Aura readings are based on the principle of Kirlian in a modern way and use biodata sensors to create an instant film image which shows a radiance around your likeness, a portrait of you and your energy. “We use biometric sensors, a technology similar to the one in passport controls, to read the different acupressure points in your fingers, heart rate, sweat levels… and that converts into what we see in colours printed in Polaroid which is a nice keepsake”, explains Jen Purvis, manager of SLC. “Our readers analyse the shades according to the chakra system. It’s not a psychic or clairvoyant work, it has to do with what’s happening to you at that precise moment. We have a conversation and we ask related questions.” In the past 5 years doing the readings, the team has done tests before and after gong baths or energy work, and they have seen a difference in the halo around the same person.

Our Polaroid photos are a thing of beauty, full of rich colours and infused with a kind of magic. And that time focusing inward definitely led us to a moment of self-exploration and discovery. As they say in SLC, ‘We are energy’, and this image is a reminder that there is more about us than meets the eye.

She Lost Control, 74 Broadway Market, London

She Lost Control offers Aura photography readings on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays at their shop on Broadway Market, London. You can book your session here.

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Capturing the unseen

“We use biometric sensors, a technology similar to the one in passport controls, to read the different acupressure points in your fingers, heart rate, sweat levels… and that converts into what we see in colours printed in Polaroid which is a nice keepsake.”

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