Orphic Highlands

‘…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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