Staley, Willy (14 December 2012). "The Color of War". New York Times Magazine . Retrieved 14 May 2014. Issues such as othering, intrusion and dehumanisation loom over these works, and Mosse has previously told CR that he feels they “revealed something about how our governments represent and therefore regard the figure of the refugee”. Still from Incoming #27, Mediterranean Sea, 2016. Image couresty SVPL O'Hagan, Sean (15 February 2017). "Richard Mosse: Incoming review – shows the white-hot misery of the migrant crisis". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 15 February 2017.

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 ] A few years ago we shared photographer Richard Mosse‘s unique infrared imagery that he had shot in The Democratic Republic of Congo for his series Infra. Taking advantage of an old type of Kodak film called Aerochrome, he infused new color into this war-torn and often forgotten part of the Earth. See also: Jessica Loudis, ‘Richard Mosse’s Infra’, Bookforum (April-May) 2012 and Christian Viveros-Faune, ‘The New Realism’, Art in America (June) 2012; Aaron Schuman, ‘Sublime Proximity: In Conversation with Richard Mosse’, Aperture Magazine, 203 (Summer) 2012. Richard Mosse (born 1980) is an Irish conceptual documentary photographer, living in New York City and Ireland. [1] [2] Early life and education [ edit ]Prix Pictet 2017: Richard Mosse wins prize with heat-map shots of refugees". The Guardian, 4 May 2017. Retrieved 5 May 2017

Infra offers a radical rethinking of how to depict a conflict as complex as that of the ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The images initiate a dialogue with photography that begins as a meditation on a broken documentary genre, but ends as an elegy for a land touched by tragedy. Come Out (1966) XXXI (Triple Beam Dreams), eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, 2012. Image courtesy SVPL Non-refugees and journalists are rarely, if ever, allowed access to the Moria camp, says Mosse. “The authorities in Greece are ashamed; the conditions are so squalid.” So he climbed a hill nearby to take a huge panorama of the camp, using a special weapons-grade camera, which captures images by detecting thermal radiation. Seymour, Tom (15 February 2017). "Richard Mosse – Incoming". British Journal of Photography . Retrieved 15 February 2017.How many different ways can we read a photograph of a child holding an assault rifle? The gesture carried by the infrared ‘false-colour’ palette seems to open up this field of potential signification by stepping across a threshold into fiction. Joseph Conrad followed a similar strategy in Heart of Darkness, representing the specifics of a major human rights disaster with a deeply personal and highly aestheticised work of fiction. 2 Richard Mosse in Din Heagney, ‘Elusive enclaves: interview with Richard Mosse for the Foreign Art Office’, August 2011, accessed 17 Sep. 2015. 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 ]

Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Benjamin, Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn, London: Harper Collins, 1992, pp. 245-255 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.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 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).

To shoot the “Heat Map” photographs, they developed a robotic arm on which the camera is mounted and programmed to move precisely on a gridded-out plane. All together, the equipment weighs some 175 pounds. Each landscape comprises nearly 1000 images taken over the course of 40 minutes, which Mosse later stitches together digitally. Also shown are three of Mosse’s films. While not as evocative as his bold stils, they serve to document very different situations in Iraq and Gaza. Theatre of War 2009, a film shot from one of Saddam Hussein’s hilltop palaces is reminiscent of the photographic work with its virtually static shots focusing on a group of soldiers ‘hanging about’ on the ruins. Every conflict effects different people in different ways, these videos make apparent how Mosse gets right to the heart of each conflict to find a suitable way to best present his experiences to the viewer. Sekula, in ‘In Conversation with Benjamin H.D. Buchloh’, in Sekula, Performance Under Working Conditions, Sabine Breitweiser (ed.), Vienna: Hatje Cantz, 2003, p. 46.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. One month ago, the renowned Irish, New York-based photographer Richard Mosse booked a last-minute flight to Lesbos. The Greek island, home to the notorious Moria refugee camp, had been hit by a snowstorm. Mosse had witnessed the squalid, overcrowded conditions at Moria a year prior, and the thought of Moria’s inhabitants braving snow and freezing temperatures compelled him to return and document the refugee crisis there again. Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering. Morality, Media and Politics, Graham Burchell trans., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 22. 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. As of 2023 [update] he lives and works in New York City and Ireland. [1] [3] He has worked in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Palestine, Haiti and the former Yugoslavia.