Richard Mosse: Infra

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Richard Mosse’s work was first introduced to me last year; on hearing that he was to be exhibited at the Open Eye Gallery I was eager to go and experience it first hand. Is the reader faced with the whiter than white space of the aesthetics of the White Cube which collects and reifies everything? In a Victorian context, the objective state of affairs of British and Belgian colonial greed can only be signalled by Conrad, through delayed decoding.

Infra,” Richard Mosse’s first book, offers a radical rethinking of how to depict a conflict as complex and intractable as that of the ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Infra, for example, Mosse adopts a military tracking technique that uses the infrared field (hence the name of the series), invisible to the naked eye but capable of revealing human presence through the visual recording of heat. Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to announce Infra, the second solo exhibition of photographs by Richard Mosse.Bursting with those hues of crimson and pink; though re-contextualising, they render us, the viewer, fully conscious of the situation Mosse is depicting.

The other constant of these images is the backdrop, the Congolese landscape of rolling hills, lines of trees, jungle, sky, clouds, snaking river streams, and open fields hugging the contours of the land, where people are dwarfed by the scale of their surroundings, as in Men of Good Fortune, or in the aerial shots, for example Lava Floe, showing the higgledy-piggledy shapes of mountains and sparsely populated townships criss-crossed by dirt tracks. 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. In an interview about Infra, Mosse describes his work as allegorical, a concept as laden with its literary and philosophical legacy as the ineffable.

When it ventures to do the same for another culture, however, it betrays its limitations, underdevelopment, semantic weakness.

Nevertheless, when you look at the landscape of Infra, you are also looking at an unspoken contemporary discursive landscape which includes Convert and Salgado, but excludes the problematic of the virtual of much art photography of the 1980s and 1990s or ‘direct address’ didacticism. This makes the exploitation of filmed and photographed poverty a perfect double (analogy) for rubber, coltan or slave labour’. In fact, his work has always been a challenge not only to the relationship between reality and representation—controintuitively congenital to the entire genre since its origins—but to photography itself, which ever since it discovered its elective affinity with conceptual art has experienced a continuous and only apparently irresolvable conflict between content and container, between ethics and aesthetics. Rather than getting right to the heart of the conflict, they look at what has been left behind and the impact of the devastation. In 2001 he graduated with a BA from King’s College London and completed his MFA in photography at Yale University in 2008.Mosse’s photographs and films document armed conflicts, humanitarian crises, and environmental crimes, addressing the power and failures of “the documentary image.

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. You can see people have been chopped off,” he says gesturing to a man’s head and torso, centimeters away from his legs. King Leopold’s Ghostwas a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as was his recentTo End All Wars. He keeps it in Ireland because transporting the camera within Europe falls under a single agreement, whereas bringing it elsewhere requires significant permissions.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. Read an excerpt from Mosse's essay in "Infra," his book of photographs on eastern Congo co-published in 2012 by Aperture Foundation and the Pulitzer Center.