The thermal photon emissivity at the QCD chiral crossover is investigated using imaginary momentum correlators. These have been measured on a newly generated 20 × 96 3 lattice-QCD ensemble with O (𝑎)-improved Wilson quarks and physical up, down and strange quark masses at a temperature 𝑇 = 154 MeV near the pseudo-critical temperature. In order to realize the photon on-shell condition, the spatially transverse Euclidean correlators have to be evaluated at imaginary spatial momenta. Employing a bounding method, we present a preliminary result on the quantity 𝐻 𝐸 (𝜔 1 ), which corresponds to an energy-moment of the photon spectral function 𝜎(𝜔)/𝜔 defined by the weight function 1/(𝜔 2 + 𝜔 2 𝑛 ), the 𝜔 𝑛 being integer multiples of 2𝜋𝑇.