Picturing Aura (MIT Press 2025) is a historical, anthropological, and philosophical study of modern efforts to visualize that hidden, radiant force that envelops the living body and is known as the aura. This book traces the rise and global spread of modern instruments and techniques for visualizing auras, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, exploring how pictures of aura have been put to work in diverse domains of psychical and parapsychological research, esotericism and occultism, art photography, and popular culture, as well as the New Age market for alternative medicine and spiritual well-being. These histories—sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting—shaped by exchanges between professionals and amateurs, scientists and occultists, countercultural artists and entrepreneurs, metropolitan figures and peripheral actors, show how the aura functions as a boundary object: an ontologically plural entity amenable to the varied tasks of creating art, healing bodies, and mapping a hidden cosmos. My presentation will introduce some of the book’s key figures, technologies, and notable migrations of images, while reflecting on the very endeavour of making the aura visible and the challenges it poses to established assumptions about science, religion, and art.

Jeremy Stolow is Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. He works in the interdisciplinary field of “religion and media,” where he conducts research on the religious, esoteric, and occult dimensions of technology, as well as the technological and material dimensions of religion. In addition to Picturing Aura, his publications include Orthodox by Design (California UP, 2010), a study of contemporary Orthodox Jewish print culture and its political implications; Deus in Machina (Fordham UP, 2013), an edited volume exploring the relationship between religion and technology from a historical and transcultural perspective; as well as several co-edited journal issues focusing on the genealogy of animation, religious visibility and invisibility, and “light” as a medium of religious practice and imagination.