Home > Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine > Kirlian Photography

Definition

Kirlian photography creates a photographic image by placing the object or body part to be photographed on film or photographic paper and exposing it to an electro-magnetic field.

Origins

Although experiments with photographing objects exposed to an electrical field are known to have been carried out as early as the 1890s, Kirlian photography is generally said to have originated with the work of a pair of Soviet scientists, Semyon and Valentina Kirlian, beginning around 1939. Over the next several decades at Kazakh State University, the Kirlians developed electrophotographic techniques that used neither a lens nor a camera. By the 1960s, their work had attracted public attention in the Soviet Union. Interest in Kirlian photography spread to the West during the 1970s, where attempts were made to replicate effects achieved in the photographs of Alexei Krivorotov, a well-known psychic healer in the...