What is Od???

Photography was born at a fascinating time. Industry was rapidly modernizing the western world. Locomotives and telegraphy were making the far-off reachable, while scientists raced to apprehend the invisible universe—one foot in the empirical and the other in the ephemeral. Baron Karl von Reichenbach, a German naturalist, was one such enthusiast. He dabbled in chemistry, metallurgy, geology, and philosophy, the combination of which led him to believe that all matter, both living and nonliving, radiated a vital energy he named the Odic Force. The shortened form, “od,” was to be used as a prefix (but that never caught on). To test his theory, Reichenbach turned to photography, believing it could arrest the ghostly radiance of matter and render it visible to the human eye. We at the Od Review still believe that this is exactly what photography can do, and does.