Photos By Gail
If you’ve ever wondered what a war zone would look like through rose-colored glasses, photographer Richard Mosse has already asked — and answered — that question with haunting clarity. This week’s Pink Thing of the Day is Sugar Ray (2012), a digital C-print from Mosse’s celebrated and unsettling photographic series The Enclave, which was created in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo using discontinued Kodak Aerochrome infrared film.
At first glance, Sugar Ray is disarmingly beautiful: lush trees and vegetation erupt in neon pinks and magentas so vivid they almost vibrate inside the frame. But this candy-colored dreamscape is not the fantasy setting it appears to be. The image was made in the midst of one of the world’s most devastating, underreported humanitarian crises. Mosse created The Enclave using Aerochrome — a military reconnaissance film designed to render chlorophyll as bright pink — a choice that transforms the Congolese landscape into a surreal, otherworldly terrain. What would normally be green comes out in blazing hues of fuchsia and crimson, revealing a “hidden spectrum” of light the human eye cannot naturally see .
The result is a visual contradiction that Mosse leans into deliberately: conflict rendered in colors so seductive they almost dare you to look away. The artist has said that he wanted to make visible a crisis often overlooked by mainstream media, and the shock of pink does exactly that — it pulls you in, then forces you to grapple with the tension between beauty and violence. Critics have noted that this aesthetic strategy destabilizes the familiar language of war photography, replacing the expected “grit and gray” with ravishing, impossible color that simultaneously enchants and unsettles the viewer .
Sugar Ray, like the installation of The Enclave that debuted at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, walks a tightrope between documentation and artifice. The landscapes are real; the pink is real (thanks to the film); the conflict is painfully real. But together, they form a work that is intentionally disorienting — a reminder that suffering often goes unseen unless reframed in ways that challenge our comfort zones.
Photographed as Part of a Private Corporate Art Collection in NYC.