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next >Chrysanne Stathacos
For the past three years I have traveled around the world using a bio feed back camera taking "aura photographs" of spiritual people. Since the Theosophists, Steiner, and Tesla there has been an interest by artists and scientists to capture the "aura". Color theories based on these spiritual/scientific ideas and experiments had a profound influence on the modernists in the early 20th century, which formed the basis for how we look at and feel about color today. These ideas influenced me to embark on this project one hundred years later to investigate creatively how our relationship to color has transformed with new technologies.
I have taken 700 aura photographs of people from different ethnic, and spiritual traditions around the world. These portraits include sadhus and holy women by the Ganges in Rishikesh, India, Tibetan refugees in the mountains of Dharamsala, Buddhist monks and dancers in the hills of Kyoto, Sikh families in Long Island and artists, healers and psychics in US, Germany and Canada. The bio feed back camera registers reads the thermal electrical touch from the body, which is transmitted into a small computer in the camera. The final result is a Polaroid portrait engulfed in color.
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Invisible
Colors is the first book published by Nature Morte Books ,
the publishing venture of Nature Morte New Delhi , India, and the
brainchild of artist/gallerist Peter Nagy. The book presents 40 full-page color photographic portraits by Chrysanne Stathacos of Sadhus by the Ganges, Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala, Krishna devotees from Vrindavan, Shinto dancers from Japan, Sikhs from Long Island, and so on. All of the photographs are taken with an "aura camera", a biofeedback invention used at psychic fairs to record the aura of the sitter. The book is a result of three years of travel. The photographs are organized by the color of the sitter's aura, moving through the rainbow from the front of the book to the back. A short essay by Peter Nagy introduces the book. Each copy comes with a bookmark designed by the artist. The book retails at $10.00 and is sold at Printed Matter and Art Metropole. |
Links
Collaboration with Takuji Kogo, Candy Factory
Concerning the Spiritual in Photography, PRC at Boston University
Divining Fragments, Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY
Blur of the Otherworldly; Contemporary Art, Technology and the Paranormal, Center for Art and Visual Culture, 2005.