Soul

Space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.”  ― Immanuel Kant

According to most sources, the soul is the immaterial core, invigorating principle, or animating cause of an individual life. Even though most people believe it’s immaterial, without any real scientific basis in 1907 Duncan MacDougall hypothesized that souls have physical weigh. MacDougall attempted to measure the weight loss of six people at the moment of death. One of the six individuals lost 21.3 grams (¾ of an ounce). MacDougall stated the experiment would have to be repeated many more times before reaching any conclusions, so this was never done. However, the experiment helped to make popular the idea that the soul has weight, 21 grams to be specific.

“21 grams” is the title of a movie by director Alejandro González Iñárritu that uses this idea that the soul weighs 21 grams to tell in an unconventional way, using a cluster of intertwined brief scenes,  3 different stories that tangentially touches among them. Three main characters: Paul (Sean Penn) a dying mathematician waiting for a heart transplant, Jack (Benicio Del Toro) an ex-con whose out-of-control behavior leads to the traffic accident that kills Christina’s husband and two girls, and Christina (Naomi Watts) who is a recovering cocaine addict whose future is crushed when Jack run over an killed her husband and girls.

Beyond the artistic inspiration that the soul provoke in practitioners of all arts, religious beliefs have bound up the concept of soul to the idea of life after death. So, according to this line of thinking the soul will survive physical death, but the question that comes to mind is how?  

More than 200 years ago the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (Transcendental Idealism) stated that individuals perceive external events by means of sensory experience — which means these turn into representations of our mind — that occurs in a determined space and time. So, space and time are the mechanisms through which we perceive and understand the world.  To illustrate this, it’s as if we wore color-tinted glasses, “space and time” is the “tint” through which we perceive the world, but what if there are other tints that we don’t know? This opens infinite possibilities of what happens after life. It’s probably the transformation needed to be able to wear new tinted-glasses, with the “tint” of another dimension different to space and time.

This portrait is an exploration of the ideas above; who is this woman?  Probably in another time and space, I knew her, probably not. The strange thing is that it was a normal photo studio session, the mystery started when I processed the image. A feeling of deja vu was that came to my mind after seen the final result.

I do appreciate your comments and suggestions. If you are interested on prints of my photos, please visit my #FineArtAmerica Gallery here

Also, if you’re interested in receiving more information regarding the making of my images, as well as general information about fine art photography, please subscribe to my blog to receive automatic notifications every time I publish a new post.


Prints in Fine Art America | Website | Instagram Page