The Portrait Machine Project

A portrait series made with a machine that claims to photograph what a psychic would see, and a first monograph by the New Zealand-born, Brooklyn-based photographer Carlo Van de Roer (b. 1975).

Van de Roer works with an AuraCam, a modified Polaroid Land camera developed in the 1970s. Sitters place their hands on sensors; the device converts their biofeedback into washes of colour laid over the instant print, and issues a typed description and diagram of the character it has read. Friends, family and public figures, among them Miranda July, Terence Koh, Aurel Schmidt and James Frey, are shown in the resulting Polaroids together with the machine's printouts, so that the reader can weigh the readings against the faces. Text by Val Williams. 40 plates, 88 pages, clothbound, published by Damiani in 2013.

The project asks what a viewer expects a portrait to disclose and how far the apparatus, rather than the photographer, shapes the answer. Van de Roer later founded Satellite Lab, a research studio for camera and lighting technology, through the New Museum's NEW INC programme, and works as a director and cinematographer. He is represented by Danziger Gallery, New York.