LSD was famously pioneered by the CIA and adopted by the hippie movement. But it wasn’t the only psychedelic technology that made its way from the deep state to artsy subcultures.
Infrared color photography, originally developed to help spy planes unmask enemy camouflage, has become a favorite of hobby photographers long after the surveillance method became obsolete. It’s a beautiful example of a warlike technology being turned toward peaceful ends.
During World War II, scientists at Kodak developed a film known as Aerochrome that would shift the spectrum of light such that infrared showed up as visible red. The reason was simple: Plants are really infrared reflective, while paint and fabrics (at least the ones that existed back then) aren’t. Therefore, camouflaged troops would stand out in color infrared photos as green dots in a red forest. After two decades of use by the military and the forestry industry, Kodak began selling a consumer infrared color film called Ektachrome EIR in the 1960s, according to The Art of Color Infrared Photography by Steven H. Begleiter.
One of the earliest infrared adopters was the photographer Karl Ferris, who used the film to create a pink-looking U.S. cover for Jimi Hendrix’s first album, Are You Experienced. Keith McMillan, a photographer who worked for the label Vertigo, similarly used Aerochrome for Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut. But infrared photography went out of fashion, and Kodak discontinued Ektachrome EIR in 2007.
Meanwhile, the hobbyist Dean Bennici was sitting on a huge stock of military surplus Aerochrome. As he explains on his website, Bennici was looking for “something special for an artist friend” when he managed to obtain bulk Aerochrome “through an aerospace contact in Germany.” After cutting some of the film into consumer-sized rolls, he ended up with 5,000 of them, which he spent years unsuccessfully trying to hawk online.
In 2013, the photojournalist Richard Mosse used Bennici’s film to document the Congolese civil war, making it into The New York Times with his infrared still photos and the Venice Biennale with his haunting pink video of the conflict. Aerochrome became a cult favorite once more, and Bennici ended up hand-cutting hundreds of thousands more rolls, which he sold online. Bennici has been all out of Aerochrome since 2021, and the remaining stock of Ektachrome EIR is extremely hard to find.
The advent of digital cameras allows photographers to recreate the Aerochrome look, something that Bennici himself opposes. (“Trying to be what you are not to me seems like a perversion of reality,” he told interviewer Christoph Kummer.) Nonetheless—and with full apologies to Bennici—these photos were taken with a camera converted to pick up infrared light and a Kolari Vision IRChrome filter. Although they resemble what a military intelligence camera might have seen decades ago, they were taken with a very different purpose in mind: art.
This article originally appeared in print under the headline “Cold War Surveillance Film Turned Into Art.”
