Davies, Lucy (14 May 2014). "Richard Mosse: Congo's civil war, Interview". The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 14 May 2014. Mosse’s last-minute trip to Moria was the latest segment of a project that has stretched over the past two years and has seen the artist—accompanied by filmmaker Trevor Tweeten and composer Ben Frost—shoot some of the most overcrowded refugee camps in Europe. These include Idomeni, Thessaloniki, Larissa, Elliniko, and Moria in Greece, Ventimiglia in Italy, and the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. Mosse has created images as aesthetically stunning as they are technically unprecedented, the photos’ mesmerizing detail and visceral intimacy shifting into a darkly emotional space with prolonged looking.

O'Hagan, Sean (15 February 2017). "Richard Mosse: Incoming review – shows the white-hot misery of the migrant crisis". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 15 February 2017. Richard Mosse firmly believes in the inherent power of the image, but as a rule, he renounces shooting the classic, iconic images related to an event. He prefers to account for the circumstances, the context, to put what precedes and what follows at the centre of his reflection,’says exhibition curator Urs Stahel. The Enclave (2013) – a collaboration with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten and composer Ben Frost. Made using 16mm infrared film transferred to HD video. Shown as an installation comprising multiple double-sided screens installed in a darkened chamber. [8] [9] Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, cited in Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering. Morality, Media and Politics, Graham Burchell trans., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004, p. 117. Cf. Jeff Wall, Selected Essays and Interviews, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007, p. 283.Philip Jones Griffiths, Agent Orange. ‘Collateral Damage’ in Viet nam, London: Trolley Ltd, 2003, p. 4. Now on show at Italy’s Fondazione Mast, ‘Displaced’ is Mosse’s first anthological exhibition, consisting of more than 70 large-format photographs and two large-scale video installations.

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.” Infra is framed by a reading of Conrad which has more affinity with Apocalypse Now as metaphor of unknowable evil than with Conrad’s subtle denunciation in what passes off as fiction, but is rooted in experience: his Congo Diary. Heart of Darkness is the literary trace of a real journey into the Congo of nineteenth-century imperialism. If Conrad constantly shifts the viewpoint, he does so by problematizing the narrative with ‘the posture of uncertainty and doubt’.32 But it is a posture which suggests to his readers, through epistemological doubting, unpalatable interpretations of the colonial world offering hints and clues to aid the understanding of a controversial contradiction: the eloquent heights of Victorian moralism glossing over unspeakable depths of exploitation. Conrad’s resistance to European imperialism takes the form of Marlow’s oblique narrative, mediating between author, the imaginative faculty, and the real. But the imagination has an ethical purpose: to provoke thought and do so by expressing epistemological doubts about mainstream views. In a Victorian context, the objective state of affairs of British and Belgian colonial greed can only be signalled by Conrad, through delayed decoding.33 Rather than fictionalising the place, an element of fiction – or at least ‘non-reality’ – is introduced by Mosse into the filmic realm. This shift is not achieved by manipulating his work on a computer, or by scripting his content, but rather by the artist’s selection of a particular set of tools and materials. David Harvey, Social Justice and The City, London: Edward Arnold 1973, p. 13. More recently, cf. Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. David Harvey, Social Justice and The City, London: Edward Arnold 1973, p. 13. More recently, cf. Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.

Emma Sumner finds darkness and light in a pair of photographic exhibitions depicting the horrors of war…

I knew ahead of time that my subject would elude me. Rather like Conrad’s Marlow on the steamer, I was pursuing something essentially ineffable, something so trenchantly real that it verges on the abstract. […] The decision to use colour infrared film forms a dialogue with these specifics. The poetic associations carried by the pink and red palette are a by-product of this conceptual framework, but a very fertile one. It’s an allegorical landscape – La Vie En Rose – steeped in a kind of magical realism.30 I find it a very hypocritical situation. Not because journalists and photographers would be just a gang of profiteers exploiting others’ poverty by turning it into attractive or impressive images and making piles of money, but because none of the profits that these images generate return to the people that deliver the raw material: the poor allowing themselves to be filmed. This makes the exploitation of filmed and photographed poverty a perfect double (analogy) for rubber, coltan or slave labour’. Els Roelandt, ‘Renzo Martens’ Episode 3: Analysis of a Film Process in Three Conversations’, A Prior Magazine No. 16, February 2008, www.aprior.org. 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. In this body of work Mosse thus engages with some of the key issues of documentary photography: Is there such a thing as truth in images? To what extent is an ‘impassive lens’ important when telling personal stories? Is an impassive lens even possible given that the very presence of a photographer changes the situation being photographed? If the photograph is already a manipulated version of the real, can a staged or recreated scene depict the past accurately?Mosse began working on the series three years ago, spurred by the growing urgency of the situation for refugees fleeing the Middle East and Northern Africa. “This has become one of the big subjects of our time,” Mosse says. But he has by no means been alone in the effort.