Untitled from the series "Voices"

The world’s first electrographic photographs taken by the Polish inventor Jakub Narkevitsch (b.1850) brought out the possibilities of technology to describe phenomena invisible to the human eye. He observed extraordinary bursts of light especially in the pictures of fearful and tense test subjects.

Henri Baraduc, who continued his research in France in 1886, called the phenomenon “the light of the human soul”. The imaging technique got its name from Semjon and Valentina Kirlian, a Ukrainian married couple who studied the method all their lives. They used the method mainly for making diagnoses in hospitals.

Since the Soviet Union had defined the research as secret, the work of the Kirlians became known in Western countries quite late, only in 1959. Kirlian imaging became more widely known in 1968, when a group of doctors led by Viktor Inushin announced that the method proves that all living organisms have an invisible double being, the so-called “energy body”.