With technology becoming more and more advanced, it is sparking many photographers interest to do something unconventional, unique and a bit antique. The practice of using photography to photograph the unknown is nothing new, since the camera was invented individuals have been attempting to use it for spectral photography. Check out this article originally from Artsy about it!
In 1936, cultural critic Walter Benjamin famously posited the loss of the “aura” in art—the aura being a mystical force that stemmed from an artwork’s unique presence in time and space. The rise of photography and film—media capable of being instantly reproduced—deprived images of a kind of magic, Benjamin wrote in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” However, while photography and film may have posed challenges to the notion of the artistic aura, they were the media of choice to capture the spiritual variety: When Benjamin penned his treatise, “aura photography”—efforts to capture psychic or metaphysical emanations—had been around for decades
In New York City’s Chinatown, a queue for aura photographs snakes around the interior of Magic Jewelry, a shoebox of a store located in a
The notion that a camera could lend the photographer its clairvoyant eye originated in the Victorian era. The environment was primed: Technological advancements in the field of photography, such as the development of the wet collodion process, made the medium relatively accessible, while
John Beattie, Illuminated Flames, c. 1972–73. Courtesy of Keith de Lellis.
