“Photograph taken at 11 a.m., in dull light, an exposure of 15 minutes, at a distance of 5 feet, with apparatus, without electricity. I desired once more to obtain the vital waves of the group of two very sympathetic and very nervous children. I took them in the middle of their play and stopped them suddenly. A veil is produced which hides them and covers the plate. They underwent a sort of thrill, of appeal modifying their peripheral atmosphere, intensely enough to affect the plate at 5 feet, a distance at which these phenomena were produced, invisible to the human eye. One also observes a luminous texture, like a network with stitches and knots. The fluid is condensed, specialised, individualised into rounded peas. The form seems to represent the equilibrium and the fusion of two fluidic forms, opposed as regards direction and abruptly stopped at the moment of the animistic contraction of the two children making only a single soul during a certain time.”

Featured on PDR in the collection Imaging Inscape: The Human Soul (1913)

In The Human Soul: Its Movements, Its Lights, and the Iconography of the Fluidic Invisible, originally published in French in 1896, Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc (1850–1909) postulates the existence of “the fluidic invisible” — a “vital cosmic force”, which he calls Odic liquid, that extends across the universe and “saturates the organism of living beings and constitutes our fluidic body”. Instead of all things being composed of one elementary substance, as in philosophical accounts of the monad, in this cosmic vision, we all live in a sea that we cannot see, which Baraduc names Somod.

“Photograph taken at 11 a.m., in dull light, an exposure of 15 minutes, at a distance of 5 feet.”

Artist

Date

1913

From

The Human Soul


Underlying Rights

Public Domain Worldwide

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993 x 1400

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