What you’re looking at isn’t a landscape shot photoshopped to resemble Willy Wonka’s realm — it’s the real world. A battlefield. Photographer Richard Mosse traveled the wartorn Congo with infrared film made for camouflage detection. The results are gorgeous.
The now discontinued Kodak Aerochrome film used to be mounted in aeroplanes for landscape analysis, whether geological or military — “healthy deciduous foliage will be magenta or red, and the [camouflaged] objects may be purple or blue,” explains Kodak. Then you’d blow those objects up. Lush greens are blanketed by the infrared radiation they reflect, showing you the world in front of all of us you’d never know was there. The beautiful cotton candy hills, of course, belie the reality of child soldiers, conflict, disorder and death. And you sure don’t need the invisible spectrum to see that. [Richard Mosse via PetaPixel]
olearymo
Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 1:10 PM…wherever there was a stream, the Red Weed clung and grew with
frightening voraciousness, its claw-like fronds choking the movement of the water; and then it began to creep like a slimy red animal across the land, covering field and ditch and tree and hedgerow with living scarlet feelers, crawling! crawling!
Just This Guy ...
Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 2:37 PMI remember using Aerochrome many many years ago.
It was a nightmare trying to keep the film from simply being “exposed” inadvertently. The simple expedient of a lense cap will not block IR properly.
It is heat sensitive after all. (heat being IR radiation)
Had to keep your camera gear properly packed at all times.
Some very interesting effects to be had though.
Sometimes I still miss film based photography. Not often though.