Gilles Soudry’s Latest Photographs of Smoke Formations

The haunting smoke photographs of French photographer Gilles Soudry transport us into his black and fluffy universe, where the streams of smoke take on strangely human and animal-like formations. First featured here on our blog last year, Soudry has since completed the third installment of his “Volutes” series, an ongoing study of smoke’s mystifying effects as it is captured in a single moment in time.

Working out on his studio in Châtillon, France, Soudry photographs candle flames and then got interested in the shapes of the smoke he saw when snuffing out the flames. His overall body of work as a photographer expresses his interest in translating texture into film, observing various surfaces and transparencies and the natural designs that they create. In this new series, his x-ray colored images are increasingly abstract, many looking more like deep sea life forms floating in the abyss than any earthly creature.

Though people can see different things in his work, at his his website, Soudry describes his own interpretation of the “Volutes” series: “Curls. Fluid dynamics. Jets are spreading freely. They’re suddenly condensing into turbulent movements. An aerial choreography is outlining an imaginary figure which is freezing into crystalline transparency, before it scatters.”