Jakob von Narkiewitsch-Jodko's 1896 image of "Effluvia From an Electrified Hand Resting on a Photographic Plate" is better known than his spark photograph shown here. In the late 1800s claims of "magnetic effluvia" and "vital rays" emitted by the human body were encouraged by early photographic images like this one.  Narkiewitsch-Jodko demonstrated electrography at a Russian Technical Society exhibition in 1889. When an electric field is just strong enough around the conductor to create a conductive region, a corona discharge can be seen.

The technique used to capture this electrical flow is called Kirlian photography, named after the Russian electrical engineer Semyon Kirlian who discovered that if an object on a photographic plate is connected to a high-voltage source, an image is produced on the photographic plate.