Richard Mosse: Infra

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The great labyrinth of all the photographs in the world’. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, London: Vintage Classics, 2000, p. 73.

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. 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.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. Richard Mosse (born 1980, Ireland) is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship 2011, with a generous supplemental stipend from the Leon Levy Foundation. Mosse, currently based in New York, earned an MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art in 2008 and a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, London, in 2005. He will have solo exhibitions at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, North Carolina, and the Savannah College of Art and Design, Hong Kong, in January, 2012. Infra was included in Dublin Contemporary 2011 and will be shown in solo exhibitions at Open Eye, Liverpool and Belfast Exposed in 2012. Mosse has exhibited work at Tate Modern, London, the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Kunsthalle Munich, among others. Mosse’s public collections include the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, the Martin Z. Margulies Collection, Miami, the Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City. In 2012, Mosse will begin a residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. 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 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.

If we are faced with the representation of suffering, then the question is how is suffering presented and how does that presentation impact on our responsiveness?14 The limitation of Butler’s framing is its reductive interpretation of conflict imagery as ethical dichotomy of inclusion versus exclusion. Berger asks bigger questions: what is at stake? What other images are so closely related that they cannot be ignored? Pool at Uday’s Palace (2009), one of Mosse’s earlier photographs, lends itself to this mode of analysis: a photograph of a destroyed swimming pool, once belonging to Saddam Hussein’s son; an unremarkable image from an aesthetic point of view, but one which stands out from Mosse’s work for other reasons. No American patriot would have a problem with the photograph. But what is concealed, visually absent, yet present in memory around these ruins of opulence? What does it not say about Iraq, a military intervention which was primarily justified by doctored photos of chemical plants supposedly producing WMDs? Haunting any photograph of Iraq since 2004 is the photographic scoop on Abu Ghraib, thanks to Seymour Hersch, also responsible for the scoop on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.15 Philip Jones Griffiths, Agent Orange. ‘Collateral Damage’ in Viet nam, London: Trolley Ltd, 2003, p. 4. Staley, Willy (14 December 2012). "The Color of War". New York Times Magazine . Retrieved 14 May 2014. Richard Mosse is an Irish artist currently based in New York. Documenting some of the most significant humanitarian and environmental crises of our time, his work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, Barbican Art Gallery in London, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Recent survey exhibitions were held at Kunsthalle Bremen (2022) and MAST Foundation, Bologna (2021). Mosse was the recipient of the Prix Pictet 2017, the winner of the 2014 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, and represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale with the six-screen video installation The Enclave in 2013.

The Enclave: A Powerful Documentary on The Congo Shot Entirely on Infrared Film". petapixel.com. 2 June 2013 . Retrieved 13 April 2021.

Infra’s strident combination of beauty and suffering is troubling. We need to seek elsewhere what the image suggests, thinking, imagining, even, the kind of space described by Roland Barthes as ‘the great labyrinth’, a spatial metaphor which suggests a journey of interpretation, a quest, a puzzle.6. The labyrinth transcends the frame-outside-the-frame of war photography, by virtue of forming a broader repository of knowledge and reference. Umberto Eco develops a similar analogy referring to ‘the encyclopaedia’ of symbols; always potentially active in our visual field.7. Eco’s encyclopaedia can be adapted as an iconology of remembered or half-forgotten imagery. Photography too has its encyclopaedia; it is no different in this sense from literature or even cinema, and the visual encyclopaedias of both are what art historians resort to for their strategies of interpretation. The advantage of Berger’s radial schema is that it can serve to establish a dynamic use of the encyclopaedia. Berger defines it in this way: ‘A radial system has to be constructed around the photograph so that it may be seen in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday and historic.’8. In more than one sense, Berger is transposing Walter Benjamin’s concept of history as constellation, such that the present can encapsulate the past, its memory.9. Also shown are three of Mosse’s films. While not as evocative as his bold stils, they serve to document very different situations in Iraq and Gaza. Theatre of War 2009, a film shot from one of Saddam Hussein’s hilltop palaces is reminiscent of the photographic work with its virtually static shots focusing on a group of soldiers ‘hanging about’ on the ruins. Every conflict effects different people in different ways, these videos make apparent how Mosse gets right to the heart of each conflict to find a suitable way to best present his experiences to the viewer. Discomfort has long sat at the centre of Mosse’s work, whether aestheticising the conflict in the DRC or anonymising migrants and refugees in his subsequent works, Incoming and Heat Maps, with the use of a thermal imaging camera.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. Jones-Griffiths used irony as a weapon to undermine the horror with cutting wit. Out of solidarity with the subject, he ceased to be a voyeur of suffering and became the Same, by learning the language the Other.44 Thus, Sontag’s argument (voyeurism and the media spectacle) falls prey to determinism which Boltanski counters with free will.