AA-2026-D13620
On the image
Someone in 1958 loaded an infrared film stock into a camera and sent a girl into the woods to see what would happen. Infrared film was the serious photographer's way of proving he understood something about light that ordinary people did not—it rendered foliage as vivid magenta and skin as ghostly white, the botanical equivalent of a parlor trick dressed up as science. The girl stands on a wooden bridge or walkway cutting through dense forest, dressed in a light shirt and checkered shorts, looking back at the camera with the mild resignation of a child enlisted in a technical experiment she did not ask to be part of.
The appeal of infrared in the 1950s was that it revealed a version of the world that human eyes could not see, which meant the photographer had briefly become a translator of invisible truth. What actually happened was that trees came out hot pink and the whole forest looked like a hallucination, which proved something about the film and nothing about the woods. The girl's expression suggests she has been standing on this bridge for longer than seems necessary while the photographer fiddled with exposure settings.
Visually related — by likeness
Girl in Woods with Infrared Film, 1958. 1958. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-D13620. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/girl-in-woods-with-infrared-film-1958.
@misc{aaAA2026D13620,
title = {Girl in Woods with Infrared Film, 1958},
year = {1958},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-D13620},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/girl-in-woods-with-infrared-film-1958}
}TY - ART TI - Girl in Woods with Infrared Film, 1958 PY - 1958 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-D13620 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/girl-in-woods-with-infrared-film-1958 ER -
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