Richard Mosse: Infra

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Emma Sumner finds darkness and light in a pair of photographic exhibitions depicting the horrors of war… For centuries, the Congo has compelled and defied the Western imagination. Richard Mosse brings to this subject the use of a discontinued military surveillance technology, a type of color infrared film called Kodak Aerochrome. Originally developed for camouflage detection, this aerial reconnaissance film registers an invisible spectrum of infrared light, rendering the green landscape in vivid hues of lavender, crimson, and hot pink. Philip Jones Griffiths, Agent Orange. ‘Collateral Damage’ in Viet nam, London: Trolley Ltd, 2003, p. 4. On the wall text before you enter the exhibitionis a cryptic quote from Mosse, that he is “concerned less with the conscience than with the consciousness”. Gallery 1 contains a selection of large prints depicting the landscapes of Eastern Congo. Bursting with those hues of crimson and pink; though re-contextualising, they render us, the viewer, fully conscious of the situation Mosse is depicting. These evocative images demand your full and prolonged fixation to their delicate balance between the real and the surreal. The hues give these landscape a blood soaked appearance, a memorial to the lives lost within those unimaginably fraught battles. Philip Jones-Griffiths, Vietnam Inc., London: Phaidon, 2001, p. 71. The village was later wiped out by US bombing.

Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Benjamin, Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn, London: Harper Collins, 1992, pp. 245-255 Seymour, Tom (15 February 2017). "Richard Mosse – Incoming". British Journal of Photography . Retrieved 15 February 2017.To shoot the “Heat Map” photographs, they developed a robotic arm on which the camera is mounted and programmed to move precisely on a gridded-out plane. All together, the equipment weighs some 175 pounds. Each landscape comprises nearly 1000 images taken over the course of 40 minutes, which Mosse later stitches together digitally. Geoff Manaugh, ‘Leviathan: An interview with Richard Mosse’, BLDG BLOG, 21 December 2009, , accessed 26 November 2011. He went to the roof for a demonstration of the camera and was able to see two men who had been invisible to the naked eye welding far away. “You could see the light of the welding flame reflected on one man’s beer belly,” Mosse recalls, “It was just such an extraordinary new image that I’d never seen before. It was so crisp.” In addition to the incredible optical zoom, the camera uses medium-wave infrared, so it’s able to cut through heat haze. “It diffuses light; it shoots nice straight lines—that’s how it can see people from very far,” he explains. How many different ways can we read a photograph of a child holding an assault rifle? The gesture carried by the infrared ‘false-colour’ palette seems to open up this field of potential signification by stepping across a threshold into fiction. Joseph Conrad followed a similar strategy in Heart of Darkness, representing the specifics of a major human rights disaster with a deeply personal and highly aestheticised work of fiction. 2 Richard Mosse in Din Heagney, ‘Elusive enclaves: interview with Richard Mosse for the Foreign Art Office’, August 2011, accessed 17 Sep. 2015. The Enclave: A Powerful Documentary on The Congo Shot Entirely on Infrared Film". petapixel.com. 2 June 2013 . Retrieved 13 April 2021.

For three years, Mosse has captured retina-searing images of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo for his series Infra, all shot on a now extinct 16mm infrared film designed originally for military reconnaissance through what he calls "an aggressively intuitive art-making process." Richard Mosse (born 1980) is an Irish conceptual documentary photographer, living in New York City and Ireland. [1] [2] Early life and education [ edit ] On his journeys in eastern Congo, Mosse photographed rebel groups of constantly switching allegiances, fighting nomadically in a jungle war zone plagued by frequent ambushes, massacres, and systematic sexual violence. These tragic narratives urgently need telling but cannot be easily described. Like Joseph Conrad a century before him, Mosse discovered a disorienting and ineffable conflict situation, so trenchantly real that it verges on the abstract, at the limits of description. While still only in his early thirties, Richard Mosse has exhibited his work internationally, from Tate Modern to Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and Kunsthalle, Munich. His work has already been collected by several museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne. He is representing Ireland at the Venice Biennale 2013 with The Enclave, an immersive multimedia installation projected onto several screens, and composed of footage shot last year in the Democratic Republic of the Congo using an Arri and 16mm infrared film (transferred to HD), with a soundscape recorded on location. To coincide with the Biennale, Aperture has published his second monograph.

Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott, London and New York: Verso, 2009, pp. 83-105; p. 96 Richard Mosse’s Infra project uses obsolete military surveillance technology, a type of infrared colour film called Kodak Aerochrome, to investigate ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mosse has received criticism for his work, notably from Ireland, for presenting difficult global conflicts or deeply personal situations amidst these conflicts in an overly aestheticised way, being described as "problematic", "troubling", [6] and discomforting. [7] Publications [ edit ] Issues such as othering, intrusion and dehumanisation loom over these works, and Mosse has previously told CR that he feels they “revealed something about how our governments represent and therefore regard the figure of the refugee”. Still from Incoming #27, Mediterranean Sea, 2016. Image couresty SVPL