Richard Mosse, Beyond Images
Richard Mosse travels to crisis areas, breaking free from the conventions of photo-reportage. His images use beauty and technology as “post-documentary” weapons in order to raise awareness. In Lausanne, Photo Élysée is presenting his latest project about the environmental crisis: Broken Spectre, a huge video installation (Nov. 3rd, 2023-Feb. 25th, 2024). A look back over a career spanning almost 20 years.
Wars, migratory crises, humanitarian, and ecological crises—your subjects are those of photojournalists. In fact, you started out as one. Why did you stop? That was the initial impulse, but I can’t pretend that I was ever a photojournalist. I studied English Literature in London then moved to Berlin and worked as a dishwasher in an Irish pub to save up enough money to travel in post-war Balkan nations to begin my first project. I wanted to try to document the missing persons crisis in the former Yugoslavia. The bodies of hundreds of thousands of people were still unrecovered—many of them buried in mass graves. Their tragic absence, written on the Bosnian landscape, formed a terrible hole in these societies. I wanted to document that absence, but you can’t photograph what isn’t there. I found the language of photojournalism too limited and photography itself too concrete—how can you possibly depict the absence of hundreds of thousands of people?
I read around the subject. Judith Butler, Andreas Huyssen, Elaine Scarry, Walter Benjamin. I looked at art to try to understand this failure. I was drawn to Paul Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus’ and Thomas Struth’s photographs of post-war German towns and cities, which he calls “embarrassed landscapes”.The architecture spoke, to him, of the shame of the Holocaust and of the war, and yet it’s just a picture of the street. To me, a very carefully observed image of the lived environment revealed more about society even than a wonderfully composed photograph by, for example, Cartier-Bresson. I was also looking at Ori Gersht, an Israeli photographer living in London, and his strong photographs made in Auschwitz and Bosnia. I sold my Nikon camera to buy an old Linhof 4x5 inch field camera. It was the best thing I ever did, because it forced me to look in a different way.
AGGRAVATED MEDIA
Why have you chosen images precisely to show what we can’t see? I’ve always struggled with the concreteness of photography. In my own work, I am often at a loss, because the subjects I’m attempting to convey are so opaque, complex, layered, or abstract. They can verge on the ineffable or, as Samuel Beckett called it, “the unnameable”. These are qualities that photography struggles to convey. And particularly documentary photography, which is such a powerful vehicle for evidence, testimony, and specificity, but which is inherently limited to describing only what the lens sees.
My strategy is to try to identify what I call “aggravated media”. By this, I simply mean a form of photography that carries some complicity or agency within the subject. I guess I could be called a reluctant documentarian because I’m suspicious of photography. Much of it emerged from military research, was developed as a tool for colonization, state surveillance, biopower, cadastral mapping to establish private property or delineate the frontiers of the modern nation state, or is involved in resource extraction
or industry. The ways in which photography is implicated in the subjects that I attempt to examine are useful to unpack and think through the larger invisible systems involved in each story. Those can be encoded within the medium’s materiality, adding another layer of meaning to the raw image. These are often extremely unwieldy media to use in the field, which can take a considerable amount of patience and ingenuity to reverse engineer for use as a documentary storyteller. It makes me understand how the technology speaks and what it can reveal. That process becomes a way of meditating on the subject itself, as I build my own visual language to describe it. And of course, such media often carry incongruous or unfamiliar aesthetic qualities, which can disarm the viewer and resuscitate exhausted documentary imagery.
Could you give some examples of these “aggravated media”?
Incoming (2017), my film (1) on the refugee crises, is an example. The camera itself is a medium wave infrared camera that can image radiant heat from an extreme distance. Under test conditions, it can detect the human body from 30km, day or night. The camera was designed for militaries and police forces for long range border enforcement, a manifestation of what Foucault called a ‘technology of power’. I see the camera as an essential part of the European Union’s dehumanizing immigration policies and our failure, on a mass scale, to live up to our legal responsibility to grant asylum to refugees, which each European nation ratified under the Geneva Conventions following World War II. The camera, and the materiality of how it was designed to see, encodes these invisible systems within the imagery I produced of the dangerous journeys and precarious living conditions of the millions of asylum seekers landing on European shores between 2014-18.
My earlier work, the Infra series and The Enclave film, made in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (2010-15), also speaks through aggravated media. The rare film stock that I loaded in my cameras, Kodak Aerochrome, depicts the infrared landscape in luminous pinks and reds. It was originally designed for camouflage detection and aerial battlefield reconnaissance and was also used in geology and mineralogy, to locate rare earth minerals, which are one of the root causes of eastern Congo’s cycle of violent wars. So, the medium is very much the message, and in this case, it also carried some interesting effects in terms of perceptual psychology, as pink and red are proven to trigger apprehension and alarm—an expedient palette to ask people to pay attention to an ignored humanitarian disaster.
Using military technology isn’t harmless. This can raise ethical questions, and even be problematic for some people. What’s your response to that? These technologies are very revealing of the foundations of our society’s ways of seeing, whether that’s mapping the rainforest for resource extraction or revealing the bodies of asylum seekers in the scope of a weapons grade technology designed to keep them out. It’s important that we don’t look away from these realities.
De gauche à droite from left: Madonna & Child, South Kivu, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. 2012. Série Infra series. Digital C-print. 152 x 122 cm. Un membre de l’armée nationale congolaise (FARDC) tient un enfant dans ses bras dans la province de Fizi. The Enclave. 2013. Vidéo à 6 canaux à partir d’un film infrarouge 16mm, son surround 10.1. 39 min 25. (Commande commission Pavillon national de l’Irlande, Biennale de Venise, 2013)
Many of the things that I document are deliberately kept hidden from us, such as the refugee camps and staging sites that I documented for the Heat Maps (2016-18) series. Many of those camps are no longer there, they’ve been dismantled and cleared up as if they never existed or are hidden away in the margins of our first world infrastructure or exported to authoritarian nations such as Turkey or Libya. Out of sight, out of mind. That’s a disavowal of history. To turn that system, that gaze on itself is pretty revealing to me. And if people get upset, that’s fine. What do you want from art these days? In the U.S., where I currently live, they can’t even hang a Philip Guston painting on the wall because it’s deemed too upsetting. I suppose I come out a more European school, where the power of the avant-garde was always more transgressive than reassuring. I think it’s important that we raise ethical questions around our complicity in these subjects, rather than celebrate ourselves. At the end of the day, though, what exactly is the artist’s responsibility? Alongside making art, must we also fix society? Along with asking the questions, must we also provide the answers?
BEAUTY AS A TOOL
How do you choose your subjects and the processes you use? I like to start with the medium. Often there will be something specific about it that leads me to the subject, rather than the other way around. For example, in 2009, with the rise of digital technologies, Kodak halted production of one of their film stocks, Aerochrome, which sees near infrared. At that point, it was a finite medium, at the point of extinction. I had a feeling this medium would be a powerful tool for storytelling, but I just didn’t know how. I had returned from working in Iraq and Gaza and again felt frustrated with the limitations of conventional reportage photography, which some part of me wanted to subvert or shatter and move beyond. I began reading about the conflict in eastern Congo. The scale of this humanitarian disaster was mindboggling—5.4 million people killed of war related causes between 1998 and 2008, according to a study by the International Rescue Committee. But the subject seemed to elude communication in the mass media because it was so kaleidoscopic. After the Rwandan genocide in 1994, a nation of Rwandan Hutus went into exile in Congo, not just the genocidaires. And because they were well armed, it destabilised the entire region, displacing huge numbers of Congolese. More than fifty armed groups and Mai Mai militias sprung up to defend certain communities and tribes from the notorious Rwandan Hutu FDLR ‘Interahamwe’ paramilitaries, each with its own competing goals and shifting alliances. Even the UN peacekeeping forces, in my opinion, became a part of the problem.
It was a huge complex mess that was hard to understand, difficult to verify the facts, let alone distil into a pithy soundbite or headline in the newspaper. As a result, there was a sort of failure of journalism that meant this brutal cycle of violent conflict went relatively unheard and unseen on an international level. That seemed consonant with my medium, as Aerochrome was able to literally reveal the invisible, seeing in infrared, a wavelength of light that we can’t perceive. Not only that, but it registered all the chlorophyll of eastern Congo’s verdant equatorial rainforest in an arresting colour palette of magenta, pink, red, cyan-green, teal blue. This cruel conflict had never been seen in such a light. It was a direct challenge to the conventions of classical photojournalism, such as that of the Robert Capa school, which is a very different way of describing war. But the project began to build momentum, going viral online and being published widely in newspapers and magazines, eventually raising awareness of the forgotten cycle of conflict in eastern Congo in its own unique way. I would never have imagined that would happen, but it did. In some ways, Aerochrome allowed me to become what I feared most: a photojournalist.
How do you position yourself in relation to beauty and the sublime, which seem almost absurd or senseless in the face of the violence of what you represent? Art isn’t impotent in the face of real violence, as we’ve seen in history. It can and does change the world because it can move people, bring people together, and generate a critical mass around certain ideas. And I’m not saying that we should wait for an individual art-messiah like Ai Weiwei to lead us back to paradise. But I am saying that artists play a role, alongside writers like you, and each of us as citizens, that can change the world. Artists can’t do a whole lot, but we are very good at communicating certain things, and we can make people feel something.
Plenty of art is insider jokes—a banana taped to the wall of the art fair booth or a urinal in a museum gallery. I’m a big fan of that sort of thing, but what if we want to speak about important subjects to a much wider audience rather than preaching to the choir?That’s the reason why museums go to great lengths to install my immersive videos correctly, because they attract wide audiences and viewers do tend to spend time with the work. My work is advocacy in some ways, and it’s very important to me that I reach a lot of people. I’ve never been shy of saying that beauty is the sharpest tool in the box when it comes to moving people. Without beauty and the sublime, we lose our humanity.
What ethics are you imposing on yourself?
To be true to the subject and listen carefully to it. Documentary photography is an unusual skillset because it’s 99% logistics, and a lot of that is intuitive, where you have to get the right camera into the right place at the right time. It can be very hard work, sometimes verging on masochistic, because you have to spend so much time in the field with boots on the ground, listening to the subject. That’s one of the only skills I have. And I’ve used that skill as best as I can to communicate, to advocate, in a sense, but in a non-didactic way, as an artist. I don’t really see myself as an activist. I’m hoping to keep my subject open-ended and remain true to the ambiguity of human experience, and let you decide, let you do a little bit of work as well, if you care to look at my work, which is your prerogative. As an artist, I’m not bound by the rules of the World Press Photo. I see a moral imperative in speaking and making images freely, bound only by my humanity — and I have intervened in my subject numerous times, as any human would.
ABOUT LIFE
After armed conflicts and their consequences, how did you come to deal with ecology in your last project, Broken Spectre (2018-2022)? While they might seem different, I see them as related. What’s going on in the Amazon Basin is war, a kind of war against the non-human. Meanwhile, a lot of the refugees we see in Incoming are climate refugees, fleeing the fact that they can’t farm the land anymore. That’s the case in the Sahel, in the Horn of Africa, as well as in parts of Syria. Some of the refugees I met while making that work were coming from sub-Saharan Africa because of war over conflict minerals, rare earths, which of course was the subject of my earlier project made in Congo. Human displacement is a consistent thread.
But the reason I chose to zoom in on the Amazon specifically was because in 2018, after finishing about eight years of incredibly intense work in the field alongside opening scores of exhibitions and publishing a slew of books, I just wanted to rest and do something personal, put the superego aside and make photos for me, for my own pleasure. I was burned out and slightly traumatized, and I had always wanted to try to take photographs with ultraviolet light. Bees have evolved to see this wavelength of light, so flowers, which depend on bees to reproduce, have evolved very graphic markings, almost like landing strips, to attract bees to pollinate, which are only visible at UV wavelengths.
Excited by this, I travelled to Peru and Ecuador with UV lamps and began making portraits of orchids and other lifeforms fluorescing like iridescent jewels and tinted metallic foil, rainforest nocturnes. Making these photographs was healing, working through the night in a tiny universe of glowing epiphytes, mantises, katydids, and other fabulous beings.
But then Jair Bolsonaro was elected President of Brazil. After he took power in 2019, the forest began burning exponentially. At that stage, I felt it was time to work on a larger, more ambitious project, to try to understand this mass deforestation. As a case study of the numerous instances of environmental disaster and manmade climate change that we are seeing around the world, the Amazon is unique in that it is all so recent. In 1970 we had lost only 1% of the forest, while now we have lost between 1820% of the entire forest. That’s in only fifty years, so within living memory. We don’t have long to save it.
It’s your most complex project: multiple technologies, multiple levels of narrative, multiple scales. Why this complexity? It’s a maximalist piece. To go back to this idea of the ineffable, I felt the subject was too big for language. The Amazon itself spans nine countries, but climate change is even bigger. They are both what Timothy Morton would call a “hyperobject”. How do you find a lens wide enough? I wanted to break it down into scales to show this vast subject from different points of view: the macro, the micro and the human scale, each with its own medium. I shot the macro scenes from a helicopter using a custom-built multispectral video camera, emulating those found on remote sensing satellites in space, used by environmental scientists.This was important to show the massive systematic organization required to clear huge tracts of rainforest, carried out by mafia groups and paid for by multinational business investment on an international level. For the microscopic level, I used UV lamps to reveal the teeming biodiversity in only a few square centimetres on the forest floor. And for the human scale, I used analogue black & white infrared film, shot with anamorphic lenses, which carries a luscious cinematic tonality that is easier to relate to, as well as echoes of the fraught baggage of the Western film.
There were very distinct reasons to employ each medium in these ways, but the magic happens in the montage, when the film’s edit jumps between and across the various media and scales, creating a jarring visual dissonance. A woman told me she had to exit the film because she couldn’t stop crying during the scene with the old growth trees being cut down with chainsaws. I asked her why she found a scene of trees being cut down so disturbing and she told me she felt moved because the scene comes just after ultraviolet pictures of the forest floor. It was the process of montage. Those leaps between the scales and between the media are very uncomfortable for a lot of viewers. They’re hard to detect, but they generate a lot of the power of the film.
Is there a growing presence of the living in your work (vegetation in Infra and The Enclave, then the human body in Incoming and the Heat Maps, and now the Amazon rainforest)? I hadn’t thought about that, but it’s true.There’s a scholar from the University of Cambridge, Christine Jakobson, who wrote a PhD called ‘Camera Mortis: Ethics and Aesthetics in Emmanuel Levinas and Richard Mosse’. I struggled with that because I never really set out to photograph death, although of course I have. I’m so glad that you see what James Joyce called “good warm life” in my work. Multispectral imaging reveals the health of the forest as well as its degradation, while thermal imaging shows the life-giving warmth of the human body, and Aerochrome shows us infrared light reflected off the chlorophyll. It’s all about life, really.
Richard Mosse makes his films with Ben Frost, composer, and Trevor Tweeten, director of photography.
To coincide with the exhibition at Photo Élysée, Richard Mosse will be publishing his photographs from Broken Spectre alongside photograms: Broken Spectre, Loose Joints, in collaboration with 180 Studios and Converge 45, 440 p. 58 euros.
De gauche à droite from left: Kosovo/Kosova, Church of Saint Elijah, Podujevo. 2004.
Digital C-print. 102 x 127 cm. Richard Mosse. 2018. Réalisation d’une Heat Map du camp de réfugiés d'Adasevci, Serbie, avec une caméra thermique militaire attachée à un bras robotisé de contrôle des mouvements. (Ph. Lazara Marinkovic)