Color has always been a great signifier, whether you’re aware of it or not. It’s used to scream stories and subdue moods. It can blend into the background and lurk virtually unseen. It can be used in art. It can also be used in war. But what about where the two meet, and what stories can be told there?

Photographer Richard Mosse traversed the eastern Congo with a camera loaded with Kodak Aerochrome’s color infrared film. Originally developed for camouflage detection, this film registers an invisible spectrum of infrared light, rendering green landscapes in vivid hues of lavender, crimson, and hot pink. This style is notably tied to the psychedelic kitsch aesthetic and, in this series, lends a mind-bending look to what is actually a stark reality.

Mosse has photographed rebel groups that are constantly switching allegiances, fighting nomadically in a jungle war zone plagued by frequent ambushes, massacres, and systematic sexual violence. Like Joseph Conrad a century before him, Mosse has discovered a disorienting and ineffable conflict, so trenchantly real that it verges on the abstract, at the limits of description. Infra offers a radical rethinking of how to depict a conflict as complex and intractable as that of the ongoing war in the Congo. The results offer a fevered inflation of the traditional reportage document, underlining the tension between art, fiction, and photojournalism. Infra initiates a dialogue with photography that begins as an intoxicating meditation on a broken documentary genre, but ends as a haunting elegy for a vividly beautiful land touched by unspeakable tragedy. Click here for more info.

Jack Shainman Gallery: 513 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011