RICHARD MOSSE, INCOMING (2017)

The panoramic photographs and stills from Irish artist Richard Mosse’s 3- channel video installation, Incoming, were shot with a military-grade thermal camera designed for the battlefield and long- range border surveillance. It can detect movement up to 18 miles away. But Mosse pressed it into service for another purpose: charting the mass migrations and displacement across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. He focuses on two of the most dangerous routes to Europe: one from the east, where Syrian, Afghani, and Iraqi migrants cross from Turkey to reach the Aegean islands; and one from the south, where Senegalese, Sudanese, Ethiopian, Nigerian, and other refugee populations from Africa cross the Mediterranean Sea in an effort to reach the shores of Italy. The large-scale photographs, measuring as much as 4 feet high by 9 feet long, depict the same subjects that governments would track using the state-ofthe-art surveillance technology, but in a manner consistent with a documentary photographer’s immersive, humane perspective. The images are stark renditions in which people appear almost as they would in an X-ray. Incoming simultaneously highlights refugee populations as vulnerable and erases certain features that would make it easier to identify them as individuals, thereby suggesting the ways that the technology can be used to dehumanize them. — M.A.

Richard Mosse, Moria Camp, Lesbos, Greece (2016), digital chromogenic prints on metallic paper; courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York