Richard Mosse

Here Come the Warm Jets, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2012

Richard Mosse (Irish, born 1980), Here Come the Warm Jets, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2012, digital chromogenic print, 40 x 50 in. Schwartz Art Collection, Harvard Business School, 2013.2. © Richard Mosse; photo: courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

This work, from Richard Mosse’s Infra series, depicts the war between rebel factions and the Congolese national army in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was photographed using Kodak Aerochrome, a discontinued reconnaissance infrared film, which registers chlorophyll in live vegetation, resulting in a vibrant landscape composed of pinks and reds. As Mosse has described, "I wanted to export this technology to a harder situation, to up-end the generic conventions of calcified mass-media narratives and challenge the way we're allowed to represent this forgotten conflict… I wanted to confront this military reconnaissance technology, to use it reflexively in order to question the ways in which war photography is constructed."