Series: Seelen (souls)
Year: 2021
Technique: Handmade analog chromogenic–print luminograms on Kodak Endura photographic paper
Size: 176 × 123 cm each
Edition: unique

What is the soul?
Intellectuals and philosophers have pondered on the subject since ancient times, from Socrates to Kant. Science desperately tried to locate the soul inside the human body, to weigh it and to give it substance. The mind demands reason and desires to capture. Yet the soul remains elusive…

The soul just is.

Nebulous, tender, forgiving, ethereal and all encompassing. We intuitively feel it exists and the body we inhabit is just a vessel, carrying us through a finite moment of an infinite existence. A soul has no fear, nor does it feel the constraints of the straitjacket, which is the human conscience. A soul recognises another soul and they dance together in a plethora of colour and light. Immortal.

Peter Hauser found himself repeatedly sketching an amorphous shape, which he began to explore in his Egg & Foam series of analog stills. Continually fascinated with what lays beneath the surface, Peter allowed these shapes to spill out onto larger than life photograms. Souls began to appear. With the help of an enlarger (which is normally used in the dark room for exposing film negatives to light-sensitive photographic paper), differently filtered light was projected twice onto Kodak Endura photographic paper. This resulted in two main colours and a mixed area, which frames the soul and gives it an aura. The soul abstractions drawn with light were thus generated with a method which in itself is not quite tangible.

Sandra Nedvetskaia, 2021