‘…I was pursuing something essentially ineffable, something so trenchantly real that it verges on the abstract, at the very limits of description’ Richard Mosse

Mosse used the Aerochrome camera to suggest a radical reimagining of how to image conflict. In Orphic Highlands, 2012, a panorama of jewel-toned pinks and grey blues, is at once hallucinatory and intoxicating. Mosse wrote, ‘Infrared captured my imagination. It was more than just inspiration. It was a sort of fever’ (R. Mosse in Infra: Photographs by Richard Mosse, New York, 2012, p. 131). The photograph’s title alludes not only to the Greek poet and musician Orpheus, but also to Orphism, a term coined by Apollinaire to describe abstraction’s musicality. In Orphic Landscape, the landforms are rendered strange and extraordinary: not mountains but vast pink swaths of upland farming in North Kivu, a ruby flush, a patchwork of scarlet farming plots echoing Robert Delaunay’s colourful mosaic compositions. As Mosse wrote, ‘I became enthralled by Aerochrome’s inflation of the documentary, mediating a tragic landscape through an invisible spectrum, disorienting me into a place of reflexivity and scepticism, into a place in consonance with my impenetrable, ghost-like subject’ (R. Mosse in Infra: Photographs by Richard Mosse, New York, 2012, p. 131).

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