Infra: Congo Photograph Series Using Infrared Film

World renowned photographer Richard Mosse released his photo series  Infra, inspired by a recent trip to Eastern Congo. A few months ago Mosse was interviewed by the blog Conscientious Extended explaining his motivation and inspiration behind the project. Mosse used Kodak’s Aerochrome infrared film that is usually used for aerial photography of vegetation, forestry and hydrology monitoring.

Richard Mosse’s Infra project employs outdated military surveillance technology, utilizing a specific type of infrared color film known as Kodak Aerochrome, to explore the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Originally designed for identifying targets for aerial bombardment, Kodak Aerochrome film captures a spectrum of light beyond human visual perception, resulting in foliage appearing in striking hues of lavender, crimson, and vibrant pink.

During his expeditions in eastern Congo from 2010 to 2011, Mosse documented rebel factions constantly shifting alliances, engaging in nomadic warfare within a jungle battleground marked by frequent ambushes, massacres, and systematic sexual violence. These narratives are of critical importance yet defy simple description.

Infra presents a groundbreaking approach to portraying the complexities of the enduring conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The images provoke a discourse within photography, initially challenging conventional documentary practices and culminating in a poignant tribute to a land scarred by tragedy.

Born in Ireland in 1980, Richard Mosse currently resides and works in New York City.

On his motivation to shoot in the Congo…

Congo is regarded as one of the first places in which photography became a powerful humanitarian force. Around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, there was a watershed of concern surrounding the Belgian monarch, King Leopold II’s personal abuse of power in the region. This was simultaneous with the rise of photography within mass media. Two English missionaries, Alice Seeley and John Harris, left for the Congo Free State in 1896 and photographed the brutal human rights violations that they witnessed there. This and other portrayals of the region’s horrors eventually brought an end to Leopold’s claim to Congo. But the misery continued…

While I was in the Congo in early 2010 Kodak announced the discontinuation of the stock. Defence technologists now work in digital hyperspectral technologies. The false-colour Aerochrome was a thing of the past. I was dealing with an abandoned technology which I wanted to use reflexively, to work this military technology against itself in the hopes of revealing something about how photography represents a place like Congo, a place so deeply buried beneath and stifled by its representations.