Jonas Hangartner is a Swiss infrared photographer based in Lavigny who, since 2022, has built a body of work around the single territory where he lives.Working in infrared light, invisible to the naked eye, he photographs familiar Swiss roads, forests and lakes until they become unrecognizable.,,He calls this ongoing project L'Autre Monde, organized into three collections that each explore a different part of that landscape.
Much of the work happens before the shutter clicks. Hangartner scouts a location, waits and lets something unexpected appear rather than searching for it.Because his infrared images can look unreal, he emphasizes that the light itself is physical, simply invisible to human eyes, and that he reveals it rather than inventing it, adding elements only when explicitly noted.The collection Lumina turns familiar Swiss roads, forests, lakes and waterfalls into unfamiliar scenes through infrared light, while Spectra strips images down to a single tree or sky as a deliberate antidote to visual overload.,
Living Frames, one of the three collections, exists only digitally.In Infrawaves, moving a cursor over a landscape of the Île de la Harpe on Lake Geneva shifts the image through six states between visible and infrared light.Vibes instead changes its infrared rendering in real time to match the hour of day, from a cold pink dawn to a saturated midday and a night sky photographed in the Swiss Alps.His unique physical work The Otherworld depicts a dead tree he first photographed in Vullierens in June 2022, his first infrared shot, months before the tree was cut down. The print includes an augmented-reality video, accessible by phone, of the clouds that moved above the tree that day.His work has been shown in exhibitions including “L'Autre Monde” at Château de Rolle in 2023 and “Nothing is Real” at The House of Art in Geneva in 2025.
