Richard Mosse: Infra

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Originally created to detect targets for aerial bombing, Kodak Aerochrome film registered a spectrum of light beyond what the human eye can see, rendering foliage in vivid hues of lavender, crimson and hot pink. Barbara Kruger, in Karen Raney (ed.), Art in Question, London and New York: Continuum, 2003, p. 118. Infra offers a radical rethinking of how to depict a conflict as complex as that of the ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The images initiate a dialogue with photography that begins as a meditation on a broken documentary genre, but ends as an elegy for a land touched by tragedy. He continues to say that his message in The Enclave, however, isn’t even being delivered through beauty, but through the color pink that replaces the greenery of the foliage when shooting with Aerochrome. The effect has been the same though, people are confused and often offended, and that’s his goal: Mosse’s work in The Congo has been eye-opening. He considers himself an artist who happens to work where many photojournalists also spend their time, and so his ultimate goal is to capture beauty in the midst of all the devastation.

Infra’s most interesting aspect is its referentiality. What I mean by this is the way it draws in knowledge and associations from far beyond the photograph’s literal frame. Its interpretation requires us to return the image to the context of experience, social experience and social memory. In other words, the isolated image is not isolated at all; it belongs. It stands out for its discursive nature, creating its own relational space, as theorised by political geographer David Harvey. Briefly, absolute space is our norm (mapping, Euclidean geometry, urban grids); whereas relative space takes us into referentiality, applicable to text, image or both: a problematic space of non-Euclidean geometries in which the point of view is unstable. Relational space maps out the relationship between the object and the influences bearing upon it. A photograph of Ground Zero or Tienamen Square, for example, evokes other spaces, and the connotations proliferate.17 Berger’s radial model is relational in drawing the mind outwards, regardless of Mosse’s personal views on the matter. In what follows, Berger’s radial serves to identify Infra’s most significant elements.

Davies, Lucy (14 May 2014). "Richard Mosse: Congo's civil war, Interview". The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 14 May 2014.

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 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. The film also unleashes the full power of the camera’s infrared technology to dehumanize its subjects. It renders their skin scrawled by blood vessels and zombie-like—and captures the retention and transfer of heat. “The camera sees a sort of patina of activity,” says Mosse, pointing to handprints left onto the rail of a lifeboat careening in high waves as it prepares to make landfall in Lesbos.

Reclaim. Suzanne St Clare and residents of Chester @ Chester

All the mature works of this photographer, born in 1980, are in fact an attempt to demonstrate how the two paths, the one based on the need to document in a morally irreproachable manner and the other on the desire to create sublime works, can actually coincide or at least converge. 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. Mosse first learned of the camera through fellow photographer Sophie Darlington, who help him gain access to the U.K. facility that developed it. “You walk in the door and there’s a cruise missile on the left, and a virtual war simulator on the right,” he recalls.

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. Richard Mosse Catalogue. Curve Publications. London: Barbican, 2017. With an interview between Mosse and Alona Pardo, and a text by Anthony Downey. Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Performing and Visual Arts from the Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania [17] On the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, Ai Weiwei unveils his first show of glass works, including one of the largest Murano glass sculptures ever A detailed account of the press’s resistance to publishing Haeberle’s photographs in Seymour M. Hersch, ‘The Massacre at My Lai’ in John Pilger (ed.), Tell Me No Lies. Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, London: Jonathan Cape, 2004, pp. 85-119.

Film screening: The Undesirables + When the Sea sends forth a Forest

An online magazine featuring the latest arts, design, film & music coverage in the UK. Our mission: to hold a mirror up to the national -- in particular the North-West -- art scene and reflect it, uncovering and analysing the talent based here. Artificial and human intelligence, low resolutions and boids: 20 years of Random International in Amsterdam Prix Pictet 2017: Richard Mosse wins prize with heat-map shots of refugees". The Guardian, 4 May 2017. Retrieved 5 May 2017 In his extraordinary series of essays on Africa, The Shadow of the Sun, Ryszard Kapuciski reminds us that “The richness of every European language is a richness in ability to describe its own culture, represent its own world. When it ventures to do the same for another culture, however, it betrays its limitations, underdevelopment, semantic weakness.” In 2017 his video installation Incoming, commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria and the Barbican Art Gallery, also made with Frost and Tweeten, won the Prix Pictet.