We had a chance to visit Carlo's studio in Williamsburg (New York) and personally ask the photographer about the phenomenon of aura photography and his recently published book, called The Portrait Machine Project. In this Book, he "prompts us to question what we expect from a portrait, particularly when it’s of someone we think we know".

Well, I've always been interested in the way, how the photography is used to reveal the things that you could see only through the camera. I was fascinated by the idea of a line between facts and illusions. Before this project, I did a lot of researching about 19th century spiritual photography and little by little I started developing my own interest in that.

When I moved from New Zealand, where I was doing landscape photography to New York, I started doing portraits of people just for myself. I became quite interested in the idea of what people were expecting from the portraits. That felt so new to me. It was both scary and exciting because when you are shooting someone, he has his own expectations of how does he want his portrait to look. I was quite interested in the whole idea of relationships between camera, photographer and a subject of the shooting.

I was obsessed with the idea of a camera, as a machine, which could provide an inside look of the character you are shooting and show something unseen before. I started finding more about that camera and the process itself. I found out it was made by Dr Guy Coggins who was interested in the idea of what was inside people. The camera that I'm using gives the possibility to read some sort of electrical feedback from a person. It depicts the information as color in the Polaroid and as a printed description and diagram.

I started with a studio in SoHo in 2008 right before the financial crisis. I was lucky to get that studio, where I could invite friends and people I want to shoot. A major part of the portraits were made right after the financial crisis, when people got more free time. I was almost shooting every day. When I went back to New Zealand, I was photographing my family there and talking with them about what expectations people have from the camera. Then I decided to make a theme, including the people that might be familiar to a wider audience.

There were one or two people, whose portraits were different each time I photographed them. Every single photo I took of Terence Koh was absolutely different.

Well, that was the most interesting part of the project. The subject connects to the camera by the hand plates, which read your magnetic feedback and send it back to the camera. Then it converts the information about the subject and his personality and prints out the description and the diagram. The camera has just one button. You can't focus or frame; there is nothing you can do, but what was cool about that, it took me out of my safety zone. Usually photographers hide behind the camera and use all the tools to create a portrait. I didn't have any of these tools, so it forced me into this kind of theatrical performance with the subjects.

Yes, I've been doing that every day for a year. They are exactly the same, but it's not the same for everybody.

The complication of showing my work to people was the size of print outs. The camera makes it 4 x 5 little polaroids, which is a nice size, but you couldn't see all the details of the portrait. So, the idea for this book was a way like to give an equal size to the portraits and make the whole thing feels like an object and, I guess, to tie all my work together.

If You want to purchase the book The Portrait Machine Project or to find more information about Carlo's work, please, visit his website.