In the most famous painting of French Romanticism, among those that most clearly portray the patriotic sentiments of the mid 19th century, the allegory of liberty leads a rebellion against the authority of the King, holding a flag of France that stands out chromatically throughout the composition.
Just as Eugène Delacroix did in his work La Liberté guidant le peuple, the artist Pierre-Louis Ferrer also created a photographic series based on the three colours of the French flag, which become the subject of the shots to the point of changing the realism of the scenes.
Infra: Blue, White, Red is a collection of infrared shots, using ultraviolet photography already experimented by Ferrer in the past. The result is a documentary of images inside lesser-known France, far from the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Élysées.

Pierre-Louis Ferrer uses his photographs to portray the diversity of the French landscape, capturing the edges of the Alps, beaches as flat as boards and the ruins of ancient abandoned castles.
The photographer’s contrast is between nature and human intervention, a denunciation of the urbanisation of the landscape, rendered using infrared. As he tells Creative Boom, Ferrer explains that “As a former engineer in optics and sensors, I built my own cameras and filters to reach a new perception of our environment and our body. I am fascinated by the possibility to offer people a new perception of our world, to make them aware of the limits and subjectivity of our eyes’.
In fact, the red colour tends to intensify with the plants and the lawn, while not altering the blue of the sky and creating a chromatic contrast which, together with the white of the buildings or the clouds, recreates the pattern of the flag, the same flag flown by Delacroix’s Liberty.