The Unseen. Exhibition of Infrared Photographs.

In 'The Unseen' photographer Ed Thompson has set out to explore the boundaries of perception, whether they are things outside our visual spectrum or events that go unnoticed or unreported.

A respected British photographer, his work has focused on various subjects over the years – covering environmental issues, socio-political movements and subcultures. In his work he often tries to be as intimate with a group as possible, to empathise with them and try to see what they saw in themselves. But there are still limits to our sight; a documentary photographer can only photograph what they can see.

In 2010, while researching ways of documenting the haunted village of Pluckley in Kent, he found articles claiming that ghosts could be revealed with infrared photography. Under normal conditions we see a visible wavelength of light between 400-700 nanometers, the range of light most cameras record. After some research he found that Infrared film with the correct filtration can reveal light between 750-1000 nanometers, it allows the invisible to be photographed.

After photographing The Village (2011) with 6 rolls of medium format Kodak Aerochrome film Thompson researched what this curious film had originally been used for. From Kodak advertisements he devised a wider project using some of the last 36 dead-stock rolls of Kodak Aerochrome in existence – pushing its boundaries to reveal the¬ unseen. With such a limit on the number of frames (only 360 exposures) available the work was planned and researched in a way unprecedented in Thompson’s previous documentary practice.

Some of the project directly makes use of the films abilities, The Red Forest (2012); uses infrared film to document the condition of the most radioactive forest in the world and in turn re-imagines the Ukraine in deep Soviet burgundy, something that has become eerily prophetic since 2012. In The Vein (2014) forgotten medical photography techniques are used to reveal the superficial veins beneath the skin. In The Flood (2012) one of the original purposes of the film, the documentation of crops post-flood via aerial photography, instead focuses on making portraits of families who have been affected on the ground. In The City (2014), infrared film is used in aerial photography to document the effects of pollution in one of the world’s most polluted cities, London.