Richard Mosse: Infra

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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.

Deutsche Börse 2014: Richard Mosse wins photography prize – in pictures". The Guardian. 12 May 2014 . Retrieved 13 May 2014. While still only in his early thirties, Richard Mosse has exhibited his work internationally, from Tate Modern to Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and Kunsthalle, Munich. His work has already been collected by several museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne. He is representing Ireland at the Venice Biennale 2013 with The Enclave, an immersive multimedia installation projected onto several screens, and composed of footage shot last year in the Democratic Republic of the Congo using an Arri and 16mm infrared film (transferred to HD), with a soundscape recorded on location. To coincide with the Biennale, Aperture has published his second monograph.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. Mosse has received criticism for his work, notably from Ireland, for presenting difficult global conflicts or deeply personal situations amidst these conflicts in an overly aestheticised way, being described as "problematic", "troubling", [6] and discomforting. [7] Publications [ edit ]

Seymour, Tom (15 February 2017). "Richard Mosse – Incoming". British Journal of Photography . Retrieved 15 February 2017. The denunciation of documenting spectacles has a long history, from Tertullian to Debord.37 Luc Boltanski’s Distant Suffering (1992) argues instead that while the media contributes to pacification and apathy, we can respond in several ways, one being the silent wonder of the sublime. But the sublime involves a suppression of pity, resulting in a transformation of feeling through ‘sublimation.’38 Boltanski singles out and historicises our modern concept of viewer, as one which equates with passivity, conveyed by the ‘spectator’ metaphor (Debord, Baudrillard, Virilio). By contrast, Boltanski recovers a range of responses to suffering, ranging from nihilism and relativism, to a critique of the hypocrisy of the world, an emphasis on its illusory nature, a comparison of its unreality to the authentic reality of the next, a distancing effect, or detachment.39 Suffering can be perceived as touching, sublime or even plainly unjust.40 This latter reaction, within a public sphere, enables a critical response of indignation leading to an impetus toward remedial action.41 Incoming, Curve Gallery, Barbican Centre, London; [14] [15] Le Lieu unique, Nantes, France, 2019. [16] Philip Jones-Griffiths, Vietnam Inc., London: Phaidon, 2001, p. 71. The village was later wiped out by US bombing. Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering. Morality, Media and Politics, Graham Burchell trans., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 22.From Forecasting to wardrobe styling or interior decorating, Cyril has been working in the creative fields for more than 15 years now. In this video for leading contemporary art magazine Frieze, Mosse introduces his latest work and touches on the dissonance of rendering aesthetically sublime such scenes of turmoil. 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. Mosse photographs both the rich topography, inscribed with the traces of conflicting interests, as well as rebel groups of constantly shifting allegiances at war with the Congolese national army (itself a patchwork of recently integrated warlords and their militias). For centuries, the Congo has repeatedly compelled and defied the western imagination. Mosse brings to this subject the use of a discontinued aerial surveillance film, a type of color infrared film called Kodak Aerochrome. The film, originally developed for military reconnaissance, registers an invisible spectrum of infrared light, rendering the green landscape in vivid hues of lavender, crimson and hot pink. The results offer a fevered inflation of the traditional reportage document, underlining the growing tension between art, fiction and photojournalism. Mosse's work highlights the ineffable nature of current events in today's Congo. "Infra "initiates a dialogue with photography that begins as an intoxicating meditation on a broken genre, but ends as a haunting elegy for a vividly beautiful land touched by unspeakable tragedy.