Incoming, Curve Gallery, Barbican Centre, London; [14] [15] Le Lieu unique, Nantes, France, 2019. [16] Infra offers a radical rethinking of how to depict a conflict as complex and intractable as that of the ongoing war in the Congo. The results offer a fevered inflation of the traditional reportage document, underlining the tension between art, fiction, and photojournalism. Infra initiates a dialogue with photography that begins as an intoxicating meditation on a broken documentary genre, but ends as a haunting elegy for a vividly beautiful land touched by unspeakable tragedy. Mosse’s words and his pictorial Pop Art Congo remind us of Joseph Conrad’s subtler creation. Mosse’s touching inadequacy sets up a dialectical tension between ‘the limits of articulation’ and the ethical urge ‘to attempt to describe the unspeakable world’. Like documentary photography, Heart of Darkness also justifies itself as a witnessing, but qualified by claiming its inadequacy. Repeatedly, Mosse’s interviews mention Conrad’s novella, juxtaposing Conrad’s Congo to the post-genocidal country of today:

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. Tipton, Gemma. "Richard Mosse: 'The idea of the artist going it alone is bogus' ". The Irish Times . Retrieved 22 April 2022.

Deutsche Börse 2014: Richard Mosse wins photography prize – in pictures". The Guardian. 12 May 2014 . Retrieved 13 May 2014. 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. The Enclave depicts a complicated, strife-ridden place in a way that reflects both its complexity and that of any attempt to communicate warfare and trauma through the lens. The work’s strategy of beauty and transfixion combats the wider invisibility of a conflict that has claimed so many lives. 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.

See Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second. Stillness and the Moving Image, London: Reaktion Books 2004, pp. 123-143. Mulvey’s delay builds on Neorealist aesthetics. It is these technologies that Mosse breaks out of documentary photography’s contentious mould. For Infra, he uses discontinued reconnaissance infrared film to register chlorophyll in live vegetation, depicting the verdant Congolese landscape as a rainforest of pinks and reds. It could be a surreal idyll if it weren’t for the human skull, or a young, wide-eyed man holding a gun. 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. Staley, Willy (14 December 2012). "The Color of War". New York Times Magazine . Retrieved 14 May 2014. 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.

Bernice Mulenga: Artist Talk

The primal importance for me is beauty. Beauty is sort of one of the main lines to make people feel something. It's the sharpest tool in the box.'' Vincent, Alice (12 May 2014). "Richard Mosse wins Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2014". The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 13 May 2014. Watts, ibidem, pp. 276 and 279. Edward Said rescued Heart of Darkness from being instrumentalised as a trope for the ineffable and alterity. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures, New York: Vintage Books, 1994; Abdirahman 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 Geoff Manaugh, ‘Leviathan: An interview with Richard Mosse’, BLDG BLOG, 21 December 2009, , accessed 26 November 2011.

The Congolese rebels that we photographed had a very strange reaction to the camera," recalls Mosse. "They were very ambivalent." Trace or Self-expression? The two-sidedness of photography was pointed out in the 1970s: its being both image and trace, an image which provides an extraordinary semblance of the world as well as one which is its direct imprint or index (‘directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask’).20 After Photography (2009) marks the digital revolution that has taken place since.21 In the wake of debates over the impact of the digital revolution on photography, the status of the photographic fact was questioned by the enthusiasts of manipulation, CGI, digital media, and the virtual who challenged photography’s mimetic aspect, the medium’s ability to leave a trace of the real, an imprint and tangible document of it.22 There are two camps: in one, those, such as Joel Snyder, for whom the work of artist-photographers like Jeff Wall is equated with photography, who dismiss the photograph’s indexicality altogether, arguing that photographs depart from what was photographed.23 In the other, Rosalind Krauss stands out for rejecting as simplistic the recent belittling of the index. In ‘Notes on the Index’ (1977) she applied semiotics to frame 1970s art practice, as characterised by a concern with the indexical or the actual traces of the real.24 For Hilde Van Gelder, it is a question of choice, extrapolating the chosen model from the divergent photographic practice of Jeff Wall or Allan Sekula whose practice Van Gelder calls ‘interventive’.25 What counts for Van Gelder is how an image obtains meaning through the process of interpretation, something which always involves specific cultural and ideological contexts. However, an image’s indexicality remains crucial in supporting the image’s ability to signify in a practice which is also a method that researches reality.26 Van Gelder has a point: in Infra the index remains stubborn: you cannot ignore the tangible traces of the real, the landscape, the effects of the civil war (blatantly in the machete disfigured portrait of unknown of Untitled). The infrared film captures infrared light which is invisible to the human eye, with the "potential to make the invisible visible." Mosse draws parallels with the ongoing under-reported conflict in the Congo, where figures from the International Rescue Committee claim a total of 5.4 million people killed as a result of war since 1998.

Deeds Not Words @ Atrium Space

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.

Sekula, in ‘In Conversation with Benjamin H.D. Buchloh’, in Sekula, Performance Under Working Conditions, Sabine Breitweiser (ed.), Vienna: Hatje Cantz, 2003, p. 46. 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. Enter Infra, a series of photographs documenting the ongoing war between rebel factions and the Congolese national army in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Shot on Kodak 16mm color infrared film, Mosse chronicles the tragedies among the Congolese civilians and its military. Originally used for camouflage detection for the military during WWII, the now-discontinued film renders lush green matter (grass, hills, plants) a vibrant pink. Invisible to the naked eye, the pink color visually replaces a distressed narrative with one of peace and calm. Yet there is an unsettling feeling as you take a closer look at a fighter holding a menacing weapon and standing in a field of fuchsia. Open from 1 November 2023, Newson’s Yard on Pimlico Road is a new design destination located in a former 19th century timber yard

People and Places: Whitby High School Student Exhibition Private View

Boxed set. Edition of 250 copies. Includes a vinyl record with sound and music, designed by Ben Frost; a poster featuring an image by Mosse; a transcription from the film; and a signed-and-numbered copy of the book. Mosse was born in Kilkenny, Ireland. [3] He received a first class BA in English literature from King's College London in 2001, an MRes in cultural studies from the London Consortium in 2003, a postgraduate diploma in fine art from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2005 and a photography MFA from Yale School of Art in 2008. [4] Life and work [ edit ] Richard Mosse (born 1980) is an Irish conceptual documentary photographer, living in New York City and Ireland. [1] [2] Early life and education [ edit ] Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Performing and Visual Arts from the Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania [17] You can see people have been chopped off,” he says gesturing to a man’s head and torso, centimeters away from his legs. “I left them like that; I could’ve taken them out and faked it, but I really like the way it points to [the image’s] construction and reveals its unraveling.” The final photographs are printed on a shimmering metallic digital c-paper.