Arctic Aerochrome: Daniel Zvereff's Pink Infrared Landscapes

Hillsides glow hot pink and plants turn magenta. Daniel Zvereff made these Arctic photographs on Kodak Aerochrome, a discontinued infrared film first made for military reconnaissance, and some of the last rolls of it in existence.

Kodak Aerochrome: an infrared film from the military

Kodak describes Aerochrome as an "infrared-sensitive, false-color reversal film". It was developed for the military to spot camouflage from the air, because the film responds to the chlorophyll in living plants. On Aerochrome, healthy green vegetation shifts to lavender, pink and magenta, and browns become deep blue.

Kodak has since stopped making the film, and art photographers took up the remaining stock for non-military work. Zvereff's inspiration was the photographer Richard Mosse, whose Infra project used Aerochrome in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Daniel Zvereff's Arctic journey

Zvereff, a New York-based designer, illustrator and photographer, shot during the brief Arctic summer, because snow would have ruined the effect. He planned the project around a three-month summer window and kept costs low, letting stopovers become part of the journey. "Every portion of this trip was very open-ended and free," he said.

His route included Iceland, Kulusuk and Tasiilaq in East Greenland, Longyearbyen on Svalbard, Alaska and Tombstone in the northern Yukon, along with stops in Moscow, England, Spain and Kenya. Along the way he kept an illustrated journal of each place. His subjects were mountains, graveyards and highways, rendered in pinks and purples.

About Greenland he said: "I wanted to document it with a film that was no longer in existence." He also sees the region's future clearly: "The Arctic will essentially be the next frontier for mining natural resources."

The last rolls of Aerochrome

Zvereff's supplier had bought a bulk roll from Kodak and cut it into smaller formats; Zvereff shot 120 medium-format film. Expired Aerochrome degrades quickly, and when his supply ran out, the only rolls left were a few on eBay at about $100 each. That scarcity is part of why these images feel so rare: the landscape is real, but the film that saw it this way is almost gone.

Reading false-colour photographs

Look at the boundaries first. Where vegetation meets rock, water or buildings, Aerochrome draws a sharp line between living and non-living surfaces, so a patch of vegetation blazes beside a road, a roof or a river. That is the same contrast military analysts once used to find hidden equipment, turned here into colour and composition.

For deliberately lit landscapes, compare Afterglow’s night-skiing images, and for northern skies, explore Nicholas Buer’s aurora photographs.