AA-2026-3E3962
On the image
Someone in 1958 pointed an infrared film camera at a stand of deciduous trees in fall and got back a landscape that looks less like a place than like a medical x-ray of one. The forest reads as a solid mass of hot pink and magenta where the trees' chlorophyll has been stripped away by the film stock and the reflected near-infrared light has been rendered in the false color that makes botany look like science fiction.
This is what happens when a photographer decides to see the world through a sensor designed for purposes entirely other than landscape beauty—military reconnaissance film, originally, the kind that could spot camouflage from the air. By 1958 it had become available to civilians with enough patience and technical knowledge to work with it, and some did, producing landscapes that looked like nothing anyone had ever seen on earth because the trees are simultaneously themselves and not themselves. The real trees are still there, visible under the magenta, still organically arranged in the middle distance and fading toward the ridge. What changed was the apparatus between the eye and the scene.
The historian's note
This is a landscape view typical of amateur color photography in the late 1950s, when newly affordable slide film encouraged travelers and rural residents alike to record scenic overlooks, seasonal color, and working farmland from elevated vantage points along country roads. The scene shows a small hillside farmstead in a wooded valley, a common agricultural pattern across the northeastern and midwestern United States at the time, with cleared pasture surrounded by mixed hardwood forest.
Such images were rarely captioned with specific locations by their makers, who generally intended them for personal or family viewing rather than documentary record. As a result, a great many surviving 1950s slide views of American rural scenery, however well composed, cannot be tied to a specific county or road without external annotation.
The photograph nonetheless preserves a visual record of small-scale, low-input farming still common in hilly, wooded terrain before mid-century agricultural consolidation reduced the number of such farmsteads substantially in subsequent decades.
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Autumn Forest in Infrared, 1958. 1958. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-3E3962. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/autumn-forest-in-infrared-1958.
@misc{aaAA20263E3962,
title = {Autumn Forest in Infrared, 1958},
year = {1958},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-3E3962},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/autumn-forest-in-infrared-1958}
}TY - ART TI - Autumn Forest in Infrared, 1958 PY - 1958 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-3E3962 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/autumn-forest-in-infrared-1958 ER -
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