21 Grams — Chris Manfield

Ouroboros
– Archival Pigment Print
© 2022 Chris Manfield

21 Grams

In an attempt to capture the invisible, Duncan MacDougall engineered an experiment that became known as the The 21 grams experiment. This scientific study that was published in 1907 in Massachusetts, extrapolated upon MacDougall’s hypothesis that souls have physical weight. MacDougall attempted to measure the mass change of six patients at the moment of death assuming that these mass are lost due to the departure of the soul from the body. Of the 6 subjects, a subject was recorded to have lost 21.3 grams. The validity of this experiment was criticized following the publication of the experiment in American Medicine. Furthermore, MacDougall was also criticized from the allegations that he had poisoned and killed fifteen healthy dogs in an attempt to support his research. In 1911, The New York Times reported that MacDougall was hoping to run experiments to take photographs of souls, however there was no further documentation of this research until his death in 1920.

Since its invention, photography has been used alongside scientific protocols as a tool to document and quantify truth. When we look at a photograph, we are looking at a process. We think of how pictured subjects ended up in front of the camera, why, and for what purpose? The subjects in this body of work, are noted to have been sourced ethically, whether they have died of natural causes, purchased(dead) from a shelter, farm, or a licensed taxidermist. Still… they raise the question of where the affirmation of ethics really lies – whether truth is validated through documentations, real-life consensus, or perhaps something else entirely. These are the inquiries I associate with the particular (pseudo)scientific vantage point utilized to capture the subjects within this body of work.

Pituophis catenifer sayi
Archival Pigment Print
© 2022 Chris Manfield

300 Grams
Archival Pigment Print
© 2022 Chris Manfield