A military village emerges from the hills of hot pink. A soldier lurks in a crimson jungle. A man with a face erupted in scar tissue from a war trauma pauses for a portrait. Photographer Richard Mosse has captured the Congo using Kodak Aerochrome, a discontinued military surveillance film used to detect an invisible spectrum of infrared light, warping the hues of green into a landscape of lavender and revealing much more than an image shot on typical film would.
The Ireland-born photographer’s striking new series Infra — on view through December 23 at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City — documents a land of turbulent, shifting politics, systematic massacres, and unrelenting physical and sexual violence. These photographs are devastating in their reality and hauntingly beautiful in their creative form. Click through to read a brief interview with the photographer, and see some additional work from the series in our slide show. Read More »
Irish photographer Richard Mosse looks at the fog of war and disaster through a literal rose-tinted lens, bringing unearthly color to the bleakest of scenes.
By using light-diffusion and infrared film, Mosse’s images and videos lend conflict-torn lands and disaster aftermaths an eerie, otherworldly character. By laying a Renaissance glow and Pop Art flair over tense and tragic photojournalism, he highlights the seeming unreality of the catastrophically real.
Mosse’s work also includes photos of Saddam Hussein’s vacant palaces, images of abandoned airplanes, and portraits of war-machine detritus, all spotlighting the ghostly feel of things left behind in the wake of often earth-shattering events.
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Photographer Richard Mosse has recently returned from a month-long trip to Iraq to photograph what remains of Saddam Hussein’s dozens of palaces, now used by American soldiers as make-shift combat headquarters. This month, the American army is set to handover the last of the palaces back to the Iraqi army. Mosse, who has previously photographed war-torn areas of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, sat down with us to discuss his latest project and the deeply disturbing, though darkly humorous, aspects of the ongoing war in Iraq.
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