The Unseen Self: Kirlian Photography Explained by Brian Snellgrove (book review).
For those who don’t know, if you place a light electrical charge across an organic object on photographic paper, you can produce what is often described as a Kirlian, or aura, photograph. I’ve been sitting on this book, The Unseen Self: Kirlian Photography Explained by Brian Snellgrove, for a few years now, so I moved it up my reading list as it isn’t a long read. You can’t ignore the evidence entirely, and some of the results are certainly odd. For instance, a damaged leaf can show a complete aura, suggesting that something unusual is going on.
Snellgrove references several books in the introduction, which led me to look them up. Unfortunately, most are either long out of print or prohibitively expensive. That makes it rather difficult to check his sources thirty years down the line.
Oddly, corona discharge photography wasn’t actually discovered by Semyon and Valentina Kirlian, although they carried out much of the pioneering work exploring how a small electrical charge could produce an aura-like effect around organic objects. The size of photographic film at the time limited the process largely to hands, feet and plant leaves, where it appeared to ghost parts that had been removed.
I do have some issues with Snellgrove’s attempts to link this effect to palmistry, because it certainly isn’t confined to the hands. The Kirlian effect results from the conductivity of the object, which in turn depends on factors such as moisture and perspiration. I’d probably produce an unusual result simply because my hands tend to be very dry. Whatever significance a palmist might attach to the patterns is purely incidental, because there really aren’t any obvious connections. The effect is more like a spiky halo surrounding the object than anything that corresponds to the traditional lines of the hand.
Snellgrove makes the interesting point that many early inventions, such as the telephone, were initially regarded as crank ideas. The difference, of course, is that they worked. The problem with Kirlian photography is that it is mostly discussed in connection with ESP and paranormal research. My own interest lies in its possible use within my Psi-Kicks stories. The difficulty is that, beyond producing a glow or perhaps transferring part of an aura to another object, there still doesn’t seem to be any practical application for it.
It’s one of those curious phenomena that appears to exist but has yet to find a convincing purpose. As you can probably tell, I don’t agree with everything Snellgrove writes here, but that happens. Nevertheless, this book provides a useful introduction to the subject.
GF Willmetts
June 2026
(pub: The CW Daniel Company Ltd, 1979; revised edition 1996. 130-page illustrated, indexed small-format paperback. Price: varies. ISBN: 0-85207-277-5).
