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 airplanes 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]
