In Richard Mosse’s Infra
series, he documents conflict in the Congo using a discontinued infrared film
called Kodak Aerochrome. As you can see, the film turns the leaves and grass in Mosse’s images fluorescent
pink and otherworldly. The arresting neon color palate has a way of making me
look more closely and lengthily at the images than I might otherwise, and of carrying some of the emotional undertones of the conflict that viewers may be inured to by having seen many more traditionally-made war photos. It is perhaps controversial because it is portrays the real through use of imaginative and almost impressionistic techniques. Writing for Aperture, Aaron Schuman notes, “Mosse…
[has] a penchant for the staggering, the allusive, the historical, and the
Sublime...[and is] intent on challenging the orthodoxies of documentary
photography,” Photographer Raul Gutierrez concurs, concluding: “ultimately Mosse does
what good photographers always do, he forces us to look closely and reexamine
what we think we know.”
