Ratne zone viđene infracrvenom kamerom. Bili smo dakle u pravu kad nam se činilo da se sve što se događa na Zemlji zapravo događa na nekom drugom planetu a ne ovdje.
Excess or Precision? Hot Pink War Zone
Mosse’s photos are taken with special Infrared film developed by the (U.S?) military to distinguish between natural foliage and the camouflage of soldiers hiding in landscape.
Foliage reflects infrared light and camouflage absorbs it, so infrared-sensitive film can reveal camouflaged troops and buildings, as well as produce the pink tints in these pictures. In this way, Mosse highlights the eastern Congo’s natural bounty while acknowledging both the medium’s origins and, he points out, the West’s tendency to see in the Congo only darkness and insanity.In this account, Mosse is clearly using the film with an editorial viewpoint– he chooses exoticism of hot pink verdency (paradox!) versus the ‘Heart of Darkness’ angle which erects a permanent dark shade over Africa under which ‘extermination’ is conducted.
But this is military film creating this hot pink effect– and hot pink affect– military film, developed to create better ‘targets’ for the picking off of camouflaged soldiers. Yet in Mosse’s hand, this military tool, this imaging weapon, creates a riot of artifice, a huge tide of inhuman, otherworldly pink which marks the soldiers and refugees as incredibly human, as if human-ness had concentrated in these human forms having been pushed out of the landscape by pink itself.Looked at still another way, the soliders pose in the photos like the glamorous subjects they are. Perhaps the violence of that wrenching pink is funneled through or conducted to them, rather than pressing down upon them. Perhaps this is an other element, the element not of darkness or of foreignness but of ambient violence, of war, a landscape made hyperluciferian by the lens of war itself.
Photographer Richard Mosse has spent the last two years shooting a new series of work titled Infra in the eastern Congo. The artist is known for his restrained and highly aestheticized views of sites associated with violence and fear, such as his 2008 depictions of the war in Iraq, and his large-scale photographs of airplane crash sites and emergency drills. For his work in the Congo, Mosse used Kodak Aerochrome, an infrared film designed in connection with the United States military to detect camouflage in the 1940s. The film reveals a spectrum of light beyond what the human eye can perceive, turning the lush landscape of the Congo into a bubblegum pink. This hue contrasts dramatically with the severe environment within which the people of the eastern Congo live and draws our attention to the complex social and political dynamics of the country. Beginning in 1998, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) became the site of the widest interstate war in modern African history, which has claimed millions of lives. Although the conflict was thought to have subsided in 2006, with the first free elections, thousands continue to die as a result of the ongoing conflict, most due to hunger and disease. -weatherspoon.uncg.edu/
Killcam na Vimeu
Africa Is A Country
Article: Queering The Congo
By Neelika Jayawardane
November 21, 2011
By Neelika Jayawardane
November 21, 2011
War
photography forces us to ask questions about the limits of cultivating empathy
via looking, and the limits of seeing self in the other when the image before
us intimates something so violently different from the life experiences of the
viewer. The troubling ethical questions that surround photographing conflict are
centered around the attempt, by the photographer, to evoke a responsiveness for
the distressed people within the photographs from the readers of these images –
those who are almost never the subjects in the photographs, who are hardly ever
‘one’ with the subjects. Moreover, war photography often exploits our aversion
and attraction to violence: when we see images of semi-starved people fleeing
from burning homes, or eyes enlarged with terror, we are accosted by a double
impulse: to simultaneously glare voyeuristically, and to look away.
Photography
depicting danger to human habitation, the worst of human depravity, and the
hell holes of the world where every breath signifies the precarious of all that
which the viewer regards as sacred is meant to engage those whose safe lives
are in stark contrast to such instability. Such images are meant to engage
evoke both our awareness of the discord and difference between our lives and
theirs; yet, they trigger uncanny feelings of familiarity. Inevitably, we
ponder harrowing questions about our desire to regard such violations, while
receiving a grotesque sort of sublime pleasure. Small wonder, then, that
image-makers of warfare, who make a living out of constructing “statement
photographs” of scarred lands and hopeless bodies, are often critiqued for the
vicariousness and predatory nature of their photography. In the end, we are
left wondering about the photographer’s (and the audience’s) complicity in
brutalising those who are already in precarious positions by our intrusion into
intimate, violent moments in their lives.
It is with
all this disquiet about regarding the pain of others that I look with great
wonder at Richard Mosse’s
Infrared images of eastern Congo, taken with Kodak’s colour infrared film,
Aerochrome. The film, Mosse explains, “was developed during the Cold War, in
collaboration with the U.S. military, to read the landscape, detecting enemy
infrastructure,” and to render camouflage useless, thereby allowing the user to
detect enemy positions in areas of dense vegetation. Civilians like
“cartographers, agronomists, foresters hydrologists, glaciologists, and
archaeologists” became fast friends of Aerochrome; soon thereafter, in the
1960s, its usage disintegrated into the world of kitschy psychedelic album art.
But the word
psychedelic, Mosse points out, is tied to its Greek root: a soul-manifesting
experience. What Aerochrome conveys, in Mosse’s hands, is that manifestation of
souls, in profane places, within profane bodies that we may believe to be
devoid of the sacred. The quietness of the eloquent tremors delivered by his
photographs may only communicate disturbing doses of aesthetic pleasure to
those expecting the obvious shocks that are the bread-and-butter of statement
photography. What we get, instead, is the photographer’s invitation to us, the
observer, to go beyond being told what to think by the black and white of the
newsreel and charity speech. But because the images “disorder the aesthetics of
conflict,” notes artist Mary Walling Blackburn in an exchange with critical
theorist A.B. Huber, they make us ask further questions about the “ethical
dimensions” of suspending “the real”; we worry that the campiness conveyed by
all that abundant pink, and the sublime escapism possible with beautifying the
ugly are “modes of political disengagement,” precisely because “the surreal
quality of these images respond to our desire to be distracted from trauma at
the moment of engagement, to float near, but not be engulfed” by the real (in
Triple Canopy, “The
Flash Made Flesh”).
Much of
Mosse’s work sits apart from what was globally visible about the conflict in
the eastern Congo. Mosse’s use of Aerochrome attempts to engineer new ways of
looking at the eastern Congo and its conflicts, beyond meaning-denuded
statistics about the three million deaths, and what often seem like repetitive,
boilerplate stories aimed for a ‘Western audience. Mosse writes, in the essay
introduction to his new book Infra:
Photographs by Richard Mosse, 2011, “I felt Aerochrome would provide me
with a unique window through which to survey the battlefield of eastern Congo.
Realism described in infrared becomes shrouded by the exotic, shifting the
gears of Orientalism.” It is the very ability to “shift” the photographer’s and
the viewer’s Orientalist “gears” – those inevitable set of images, words, and
conflicting emotions towards which our minds grind, the moment we hear the
name, “Congo” – that allows Aerochrome’s scarlet and pink dyes to manifest soul
where there appears to be darkness.
Mosse argues
that while the word “surreal” is perhaps an accurate term for the infrared
representation of the Congo, “as it exists beneath realism (infra means below,
beneath) … any reading must also take account of this particular colour
infrared film’s genesis as a military reconnaissance / aerial surveillance
technology, an essentially western technology developed to fight a kind of
warfare that is fundamentally scientific, which operates on the premise of
“knowledge is power” (first instance of this idea was in Hobbes), a technology
developed specifically for the gathering of intelligence.”
He writes,
also, of the discoveries he made of his abilities, and where his attention took
him as a photographer:
One of the
great surprises of my work in Congo was the discovery of my own interest in
portrait photography, which I had never previously attempted. There was
something about making portraits of rebels in eastern Congo in which the
subject seemed very clearly to resist the camera’s objectification. Making
portraits of these people was often a sort of face-off confrontation, in which
the subject (not just rebels, but also villagers) seems clearly violated by the
lens at the same moment that they adjust their posture to pose for the
photograph. I found this resistance fascinating, as it seemed to highlight the
subject-object relation of photographer and photographed. There’s a certain
vulnerability revealed by the subject’s stony defiance of the camera’s gaze in
images such as General Fevrier or Tutsi town, which I feel only serves to
emphasize the authorial hand, and its objectification of the other, like a
European child pointing his finger at a black man in a provincial German
supermarket (something I witnessed last week).
Whatever
Mosse comments upon is arrived at through the picturesque nature of the infra
images, and observer’s engagement with the subtleties carried within the beauty
of the photographs. While many other war photographers direct the world’s
attention to the spectacular moments of a conflict, collective grief for lives
lost, or the massive aftermath of damage to structures, Mosse’s images capture
what appears to be a near peaceful aftermath – the lonely remainders of
domination and fear. The images contain little of the aggrandisation of
aggression, even when the soldiers pose and posture; instead, as A.H. Huber
explains, the use of Aerochrome “makes vivid” the ways in which “cruelty can be
sublime, and violence can ravage and remake a landscape in ways we may
politically detest but also find visually arresting, even beautiful…[the photographs]
arrest us as viewers, and in doing so interrupt our habits of perception.”
Huber argues further,
I think
photographs always simplify and falsify the world they show us, but Mosse’s
Congo photographs also expose something of the instability and contingency of
our perception. And yes, in this way Mosse keeps faith with a kind of queer
critique, the hallmark of which is the impulse to make the power of objective
claims visible: What is real, and who decides? The stakes are high when we are
dealing with histories of violence, where one never knows if the devil of
disbelief might outshout the devil of indifference.
When I first
read Huber’s analysis of how Mosse maintains “faith with a kind of queer
critique,” I couldn’t let go of that idea. What does it mean to “queer”
something? How does that upset/reconfigure – beginning with sexuality/gender,
but in other arenas, too? William B. Turner, in A Genealogy of Queer Theory
writes that queer theory emerged out of feminist theory and critical theory,
“with a focus on the investigation of foundational, seemingly indisputable
concepts, particularly with an eye to tracing the historical development of
those concepts and their contributions of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ such that the
differences of power along those axes of identity pervade our culture at a
level that resists fulsomely the ministrations of political action
conventionally defined” (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2000, p. 3).
My Theory
Uncle in Denver, Colorado adds, “At its most banal level, queer theory would
interrogate what constitutes a picnic and what are the threads of identity,
power, representation, gender, and sexual practice / identity that constitutes
a picnic. And maybe that wouldn’t be so banal after all,” because, as a
tool to interrogate the axes of power, desire, identity, gender, sexual
practice, representation and sexual identity, Queer Theory helps us ask seminal
questions about “how certain forms of difference become acceptable bases for
the most violent expressions of prejudice while others do not,” or, “In other
words, what sorts of differences matter?”
It is that
desire to investigate “seemingly indisputable concepts,” tracing “the
differences in power” which allows Queer Theory to “resist fulsomely”
conventional definitions. Mosse was also able to latch on to the idea that both
technique and technology would permit a revelation of conventions; in fact, he
understood, instinctively, that a technology meant to harrow into shadow
spaces, revealing all that one deliberately secrets away, could, instead,
expose the closeted anxieties of the looker.
One of the
troubling aspects of his journey as a photographer has been the upset his
infrared work causes, offending “sensibilities on both sides of the spectrum,”
writes Mosse. First, “dyed-in-the-wool reportage photographers,” the old guard
of photojournalism, often seem to find the infrared colour palette in this work
to be a flagrant violation of the “rules of photojournalism.” Certain war
photographers “dismiss the work outright,” which makes Mosse wonder whether
they are simply busy with “the guardianship of realism.” Along with the umbrage
caused to the traditions of photojournalism, he also runs into the issue of who
should have the right to represent, “as if representation was territorial,” and
he were “trespassing,” Mosse writes. The question is whether a European man –
and Irish man – can accurately speak for the Congolese. Certain discussions
have “swiftly became heated and accusatory.” He countered these heated
questions by asking whether Steve McQueen may go to Belfast to make Hunger, “a
film about “my” Irish troubles? Doesn’t he know that only the Irish are allowed
to represent the troubles?” Mosse counters that the territoriality surrounding
representation of the Other is deeply problematic, precisely because such
protestations do not take into account why “fresh opinions of [an] outsider’s
perspective might offer new ways to understand the old calcified clichés.”
The essay by
Adam Hochschild in Infra gives us the “just the facts” version of Congo’s
history, with the variations of history that most Americans do not like to
incorporate as ‘real’ history; he begins with King Leopold of Belgium’s early
venture into making an area of land almost as big as the United States into his
personal colony – and of Joseph Conrad’s vivid, and memorable account of the
unspeakable ‘horror’ he encountered, five years into Leopold’s ravages. We also
learn about how the Belgian government, realising that the decimated population
could no longer produce as desired by their colonial master, gave the Congolese
better health care and educations – but not too much education. So controlled
was the level of knowledge permitted by Begium that by the time of
independence, there were no Congolese “trained as engineers, agronomists,
doctors, or army officers. Of some five-thousand management level positions in
the civil service, only three were filled by Africans.” The U.S. is not simply
implicated, but indicted: “Less than two months after the new prime minister [Patrice
Lumumba] took power, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the CIA to
have him assassinated,” and then, proceeded to ensure that the U.S.’s
“investments were protected” by a billion-dollar system of aid that only served
to maintain their ally, Mobutu Sese Seko.
Next to (and
together) with Hochschild’s, Mosse’s own narrative is deeply illuminating: some
of the things that I felt conflicted about, as I looked at his photographs for
the first time in the British newspaper, The Guardian, are explored here. He
approaches, with honesty, what it means to arrive as an outsider to Congo, and
to continue to be a reincarnation of “Marlow”: without the adequate means of
comprehending the visual and linguistic signs, then turning to the surreal as a
possibility. While Hochschild’s words provides a sort of reassurance – yes,
this wordless horror, too, is representable – Mosse’s exploration admits to
succumbing to the classical Conradian “horror” initially, and the wordlessness
of encountering all that we regard as Other: the inhuman, the pointlessness of
such abject brutality and suffering, and the lack of clear binaries and
possible solutions.
Like more
illustrious scholars like Chinua Achebe, I have also made it my business to
critique the “preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to
the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind,” wherein Africa
is used “as setting and backdrop…as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all
recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his
peril…[thusly] eliminate[ing] the African as human factor.” In Achebe’s seminal
critique of Conrad (and the general European inability to word Africa and the
African), he does not have a problem with European ambivalence towards the colonising
mission and the colonial officers’ aversion to their own “civilisation.” His
quarrel is, in actuality, with those who attempt to resolve this discomfort by
removing Africans of their full and complex humanity. I, and other critics
after Achebe have suspected that for Conrad and his narrator, the wordless
horror he experienced was more of an indication of internal processes
concerning the havoc he saw, in which he now recognises himself as a small
tool – the root of which was intimately tied to consumption and amalgamation of
power over supply. Projecting that horror on to the Other has been a part of a
long tradition of European (and probably others’) conquest.
In Mosse’s
photography, what I note is the possibility of re-visioning that which appears
to be horror/wordless. So it’s almost as if we need to have it “queered” in
order to see anything in a morass of signals. The infra-work draws attention to
the Otherness, and removes difference at the same time without succumbing to a
cheesy sort of “We are the World” mirroring technique. Here, we have to live
within the grey (or the pink) of simultaneously recognising the
impossibility/Otherness of this place, and actually seeing the human actions
there, doing things in a very logical fashion.
Mosse
writes, in an email communiqué, that he is “particularly drawn to these ideas
of ‘the wordless horror’ that I identified in Marlow. He directs me to Elaine
Scarry’s The Body in Pain for an elaboration on the prelinguistic, guttural
failure to communicate the experiences of pain. For Mosse, these verbal
failures are related to the “abject failure of the dumb optic of photography to
describe a complex conflict situation…this failure was most acute when
photographing the pastoral landscape of Tutsi highlands [recreated in the
eastern Congo], the cattle at dusk, which makes only for beautiful and
seemingly reassuring and peaceful imagery but should in fact speak volumes
about the land conflict currently unfolding, the deforestation, the poisoning
of primeval jungle, and the destructive encroachment of Rwandan pastoralists
onto a Congolese landscape.” This litany of disparities “between what the lens
reveals, or is able to say, and what is actually at stake” is what Mosse
identifies as the “problem with my own technique, the procrustean aspect of
Kodachrome, which I seek to violate.”
One can
speak easily in clichés about infrared images: how seeing something in infrared
light conjures up the magical ability to see the familiar as Other, making the
obvious into the uncanny. Under the manufactured surrealism created by
Aerochrome, everything we see is near bubble-gum delightful – grotesquely so.
Here, conflict over the right to dominate over land, mineral rights, and access
to sex is washed over by waves of unexpected rose, splotches of scarlet. But
there’s something more aesthetically electrifying within Mosse’s images, beyond
the shock of seeing rolling, terraced hillsides as flawless as those Sri Lankan
tea-growing highlands with which I am familiar, snaking turquoise rivers, human
encampments surrounded by the abundance of banana leaves, and
machine-gun-toting soldiers who appear to be clad in campy pink fatigues. We
begin by imagining that darkness to be in the external location of the
geographical and psychosocial world that is Congo; but soon enough, as Conrad
himself recognized on his famous fictional journey down the great river, that
darkness is ours, rather than an external manifestation of horror.
Aperture Magazine
Issue 203 Summer 2011
Article: Sublime Proximity: In Conversation with Richard Mosse
Interview by Aaron Schuman
Article: Sublime Proximity: In Conversation with Richard Mosse
Interview by Aaron Schuman
Front cover
of Aperture Magazine issue 203 summer 2011 showing Colonel Soleil’s Boys,
North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2010
Over the
course of the last seven years, Irish photographer Richard Mosse has
photographed postwar ruins in the former Yugoslavia, cities devastated by
earthquake in Iran, Pakistan, and Haiti, the occupied palaces of Saddam
Hussein, airport emergency training simulators, the rusting wreckage of remote
air disasters, nomadic rebels in the Congolese jungle, and more. Reading
through his catalog of subject matter, one could easily assume that Mosse is an
inveterate photojournalist in the most traditional sense, chasing hard facts in
order to illustrate breaking news. Yet through his work—generally photographed
in large format and presented large scale, with a penchant for the staggering,
the allusive, the historical, and the Sublime—Mosse is revealed as a
practitioner intent on challenging the orthodoxies of documentary photography,
in particular the contexts, imperatives, and “responsibilities” that are often
both assumed by and imposed upon the documentary genre, and indeed upon the
photographic medium as a whole. —A.S.
AARON
SCHUMAN: How did
you first become interested in photography?
RICHARD
MOSSE: I come
from a family of artists. My grandfather was a sculptor, my uncle is a painter,
and my mother studied at Cooper Union under Hans Haacke, so becoming an artist
was very natural. My parents are potters, and photography seemed like a kind of
antidote to that., Its light-sensitive simulation is at a far remove from
ceramics so I took to it at an early age. Shards of pottery that were formed
from earth by hand will outlive us all, unlike photographs, which will perish
in the sunlight that they once traced. Photography allowed me to be an artist
without working in anyone’s shadow. That’s especially the case in Ireland where
the medium is not so celebrated, in spite of seminal work by Willie Doherty,
Paul Seawright, Donovan Wylie, and others.
Initially I
was drawn to cinema as a teenager, and became obsessed with the French New
Wave. But I found the military-style hierarchy of working in a film crew
unsatisfying, so gave up filmmaking and concentrated on my degree in English
literature. I dug deeper into a career in academia, getting a Masters in
Cultural Studies at a left-field institution called the London Consortium—a
research body formed in the interstices between the University of London, Tate,
the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), and the Architectural Association.
Studying there gave me the freedom to integrate my own photographs into a
written examination of the postwar Balkan landscape, and things evolved from
there.
AS: How did that academic experience
influence your subsequent pursuit of photography?
RM: I think it’s important that
photography is cut through with other disciplines and a wider understanding of
the world. Though I loved spending my days in the university’s library, a life
in academia seemed removed from lived experience. I wanted to be a maker rather
than a critic, a producer rather than a consumer. Photography is an engagement
with the world of things, and it has given me a genuine pretext to travel
widely and experience what James Joyce called “good warm life.” I’m most
excited when there’s an elision of the critical and the creative in my work, so
I haven’t discarded my academic foundations. Instead I try to build on them.
AS: The first time we corresponded, in
2003, you quoted Sol LeWitt: “When words such as painting and sculpture are
used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this
tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to
make art that goes beyond limitations.” You then wrote: “Yet I've always
insisted on using photography. I think something is about to shift.” Has this
“shift” occurred yet—for you, or for photography in general?
RM: At the time I wrote that I was
working at Art Monthly, a British art magazine. I wasn’t yet fully practicing
as an artist. I was the listings editor, consuming gallery press releases all
day long—the best art education possible. Sol LeWitt’s statement now seems
slightly tautological. Perhaps a better quote to answer your question might be
from Robert Adams: “Photographers have generally been held to a different set
of responsibilities than have painters and sculptors, chiefly because of the
widespread supposition the photographers want to and can give us objective
Truth: the word ‘documentary’ has abetted the prejudice. But does a
photographer really have less right to arrange life into a composition, into
form, than a painter or sculptor?”
Where LeWitt
uses the word traditions, Adams says responsibilities. How much more limiting
are your traditions when they are saturated with a moral imperative? The
photographer is expected to be “responsible,” but responsible to whom?
Documentary photographers whose work bears some relation to photojournalism are
particularly constrained. Their expressive arteries have been hardened by years
of World Press Photo Awards and the shadow of the intrepid photojournalist
sporting a scarf and a Leica. Where would we be if Robert Frank had hidden his
Leica in a scarf?
AS: So do you see your work as part of
an evolution of photojournalism? And if so, when you find yourself at a hotel
bar in Baghdad or Beirut, surrounded by traditional photojournalists, what
discussions take place? I know that you’ve got the dusty, weathered boots . . .
surely you must have a scarf and a Leica in your wardrobe somewhere as well?
RM: I found myself in Haiti this
spring, shooting for a news magazine. It was my first editorial commission, and
I ended up back at the hotel bar each night deeply confused, trying to
reconcile my instincts with what I felt was expected of me by the editors. Two
photojournalists—Jake Price and Scout Tufankjian—rallied to my side. They
pointed out that the editors only wanted me to do exactly what I do; they
wouldn’t have hired me otherwise. It was so simple, but I couldn’t see that
without their help. I find working alongside photojournalists can be very
inspiring. They work incredibly hard and are deeply committed. They also make
excellent drinking partners.
AS: How do you decide upon your
subject matter—is it driven by research and theory, which then leads to a
search for the physical manifestations of your underlying idea in the real
world, or vice versa?
RM: My process is very intuitive. The
idea must come first, but the process of making the work becomes a pursuit of
that idea—a “quest,” or more usually a kind of staggering picaresque narrative.
My journeys are often very problematic, unplanned, and full of failure. For
example, earlier this year I wanted to use a highly unstable infrared film
technology as a way of thinking through the conflict in Congo. My concept was
very raw and underdeveloped. Embarking upon the journey, I found myself
challenged in many ways, not least because I had no knowledge of moving through
this difficult land, and no experience of using this type of film. I was
dealing with the unknown, negotiating my own ignorance. Since infrared light is
invisible to the human eye, you could say that I was literally photographing
blind. As soon as I arrived in Congo I had crossed a threshold into fiction,
into my own symbolic order. Yet I was trying to represent something that is
tragically real—an entrenched and endless conflict fought in a jungle by
nomadic rebels of constantly shifting allegiances.
The actual
situation that I discovered in Congo became folded into the initial idea, and I
began to find ways to interpret what I encountered on my journey through this
conceptual, logistical, and technical precariousness. Over time, these failures
became synthesized into a kind of epiphany. I had privately reached a kind of messianic
state where I could no longer perceive the absurdity of my task. So the
research and theory adhere to, and become ramified by, an initial driving
intuition.
AS: Your work bears more than a slight
resemblance to artistic movements that directly preceded the invention of
photography, such as Romanticism and history painting. These movements were
eventually overtaken by Realism in the nineteenth century, and photography—as
both a technology and medium—seems to have, until recently, been aligned more with
Realism than with Romanticism. Do you think that a Romantic approach to
photography is appropriate within contemporary practice?
RM: Photographic realism has become so
inscribed upon twentieth-century depictions of war that we often forget that
there were other forms before it: the panorama, the history painting, even 3-D
spectroscopic views of the battlefield. In the past, this is how the public
understood their wars—as distant sweeping landscapes of enormous scale and
detail. I feel that early war photographers like Mathew Brady and Roger Fenton
were influenced by these precedents. But they were soon forgotten with
small-format technologies, and with changes in the way that wars were fought
during the twentieth century. Warfare is constantly evolving; it has recently
become abstracted, asymmetric, simulated. We are so removed from the experience
of war in the West that I feel the genre may shift once more. The realist forms
that were so powerful throughout the twentieth century may now be obsolescent.
In my
practice, I struggle with the challenge of representing abstract or contingent
phenomena. The camera’s dumb optic is intensely literal, yet the world is far
from being simple or transparent. Air disasters, terrorism, the simulated
nature of modern warfare, the cultural interface between an occupying force and
its enemy, the martyr drive in Islamic extremism, the intangibility of Eastern
Congo’s conflict—these are all subjects that are very difficult to express with
traditional documentary realism; they are difficult to perceive in their own
right. Very often I am fighting simply to represent the subject, just to find a
way to put it before the lens, or make it visible by its very absence. This
process is inherently “Romantic” because it often requires a retreat into my
own imagination, into my own symbolic order.
But the real
is central to my interests, as it’s something that eludes conventional genres,
particularly Realism. The real is at the heart of contemporary global anxiety;
proximity to the real is endured by us all. But I feel that the real is only
effectively communicated through shocks to the imagination, precipitated by the
Sublime. That may seem like an archaic term, but what I’m referring to here is
contemporary art’s unique ability to make visible what cannot be perceived,
breaching the limits of representation.
AS: When you first arrive at a
location—a U.S. military base, a Congolese village, etcetera—and explain your
intentions, what’s the response?
RM: I’m always surprised by how
generous people are when they encounter my photographic handicap, the view
camera. The people on the ground who watch me set up my tripod and unfold my
bellows are generally more aware of the significance of my subject than I am.
The problems are usually encountered further up the line, with press officers,
spokesmen, lawyers, corrupt officials, red tape. My journeys occasionally lead
me into abject situations and Groundhog Day–style cul-de-sacs. For example, on
a recent trip to Ethiopia my guide got us lost on the Eritrean border, a recent
war zone. Our vehicle’s four-wheel-drive malfunctioned, and the engine
overheated constantly. The driver stopped every half-hour to pour tinned tomato
puree into the radiator to cool it down. Then we were tricked by Afar tribesmen
with Kalashnikovs into taking the wrong road, which we traveled for days,
ending up in a refugee camp. My crew feared potential intertribal violence so
we decided to sleep in the police station. When we finally approached our
destination the Land Cruiser’s tires got stuck in the desert sand, the seven
armed guards who were traveling with us started to fight with the cook, the
driver fell asleep, and our guide began to pray. I had to dig the vehicle out
of the sand. We never reached our destination.It was an invigorating jaunt, but
not a sustainable way of life.
AS: In the past two decades, there has
been a wave of what is often referred to as “aftermath” photography. Would you
regard your own work as a part of this movement?
RM: Aftermath photography took
everything interesting about the New Topographics and turned it into a movie
set. Thankfully, there’s a place for these photographers . . . it’s called
Detroit.
AS: But how do you differentiate your
images of Iraqi or Serbian ruins from those of the many photographers who have
flocked to Detroit or post-Katrina New Orleans to photograph debris with heavy
tripods and large-format cameras?
RM: Guilty as charged. Although even
if some of my work is similar in form to aftermath photography, I do feel there
is a distinct difference in both my approach and intent.
For the
Romantic poets, the ruin carried tremendous allegorical power, and that power
resounds today in contemporary photography. Perhaps the ruin’s absent totality
signifies something very different to us now than it did back then—its timeless
resonance shifts for each generation. Nevertheless, we are still drawn to the
same imagery that Caspar David Friedrich was. I’m not so sure that we’re always
honest with ourselves about this fascination.
The thing
that strikes me about a lot of aftermath photography is the moral high ground
that the photographers often take. Their journey into darkness becomes a kind
of “performance of the ethical”; witnessing the catastrophe becomes an act of
piety, of noblesse oblige, when in fact it’s nothing of the sort. I would
imagine that most aftermath photography is really just an artist’s quest to
find meaning and authenticity through extreme tourism. I’m reminded of the
poète maudit, the Romantic antihero who will go to the ends of the earth and
transgress all moral boundaries for the ultimate aesthetic experience. This
irresponsible, self-destructive rogue was best embodied in the crapulent,
wayward lives of artists like Arthur Rimbaud or Paul Gauguin. The
“responsibilities” that Robert Adams complained about, abetted by the
documentary, seem to preclude the maudit in photography.
AS: Is the notion of “spectacle”
important to you?
RM: Last summer I found myself
trespassing in an abandoned, war-damaged hotel near Dubrovnik. I tinkered about
this Brutalist ruin with my camera, finding various Yugoslav relics from 1991,
the year that the hotel became a front line in the fighting between Serb
snipers and Croat militias. Then, as I was making my way through the wreckage,
I noticed a modern cruise ship anchored in the nearby waters. This huge luxury
vessel mirrored the hotel in form; the parallel between the two vast structures
was uncanny, and I began to think about their relationship. Placed alongside
each other, what sort of dialogue did they open up? The cruise ship, I
reasoned, is an unmoored signifier of globalization par excellence, its
tourists comfortably numb within their air-conditioned matrix, blissfully
ignorant of the traces of war facing them on the cliff. The ruined hotel, on
the other hand, spoke of local tribal enmities, of painful regional memories,
of conflict and war. I meandered to the conclusion that perhaps war is the only
remaining hurdle standing in the way of global amnesia; perhaps war is the only
thing that redeems historical narratives in the face of this leveling of
identity.
These
thoughts followed me back to New York, where I developed the rolls of film that
I’d shot in Croatia. On my contact sheets I discovered one image depicting
shattered mirrored steps, broken beer bottles, fake flowers, and a hangman’s
noose on a dusty ballroom floor. This photograph seemed to mock my fallacious
theory about war, memory and the consequences of globalization. I’d dreamed
that the evocative ruin represented an alternative to the society of the
spectacle—that I’d trespassed in the forbidden wreckage of the real. I
flattered that afternoon’s adventure as some sort of original transgression of
the spectacular. But the souvenir document that I’d returned with reminded me
that the hotel’s bombed-out ballrooms were also the occasional haunt of local
ravers. International DJs come with smoke machines and strobe lights and use
the place as an exotic live venue, appropriating its authentic war remnants as
a stage for hipsters to celebrate their alienation.
I was
reminded of Guy Debord’s words. The spectacle, he writes, “is the sun which
never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of
the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.”
GUP Magazine
Issue 28, the conflict issue
Article: A Conversation with Richard Mosse
Interview by Joerg Colberg
Article: A Conversation with Richard Mosse
Interview by Joerg Colberg
Front and
rear covers showing detail of Tutsi Town, North Kivu, Eastern DRC, 2010
On the
following pages you will see Richard Mosse's Infra, a remarkable work in
progress of what we tend to casually refer to as the conflict in Congo. Why go
there? Why use colour infrared film? Jörg Colberg, founder and editor of
Conscientious, a website dedicated to contemporary fine-art photography, asked
him.
Jörg
Colberg: Let me
start off by asking why/how you decided to take photographs of Eastern Congo?
How did your interest in the region develop?
Richard
Mosse: Congo is
regarded as one of the first places in which photography became a powerful
humanitarian force. Around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, there was a
watershed of concern surrounding the Belgian monarch, King Leopold II’s
personal abuse of power in the region. This was simultaneous with the rise of
photography within mass media. Two English missionaries, Alice Seeley and John
Harris, left for the Congo Free State in 1896 and photographed the brutal human
rights violations that they witnessed there. This and other portrayals of the
region’s horrors eventually brought an end to Leopold’s claim to Congo. But the
misery continued.
Also at work
at this time was Joseph Conrad, a steamboat captain along the mighty Congo
River in the early 1890s. Conrad wrote a short novel about his experience,
Heart of Darkness. [...] To this day, Congo seems caught in the wake of
Conrad’s steamboat. In the western popular imagination, the place is often
regarded as touched by madness, darkness and cannibalism. The conflict’s recent
disturbing turn towards gang rape and sexual terror, exacerbated by the United
Nation’s ineffective and convoluted bureaucracy, only adds to the region’s
reputation as Breughelesque and incomprehensible, echoing Mistah Kurtz’s the
horror, the horror.
Wandering
through the Menil Collection in Houston I was fascinated by Congolese statues
that had been studded with metal nails fashioned in waves. Looking at them, I
remembered that the slaves on Conrad’s steamboat had been paid in rivets - a
kind of placebo currency invented by the Belgians. Here before me, I realised,
were complex and challenging aesthetic forms made from these useless iron
slivers. I checked the date and it tallied with Conrad’s visit to the Congo
Free State. Here was ‘primitive’ aesthetic virtuosity, exceptional works of art
produced in the midst of a humanitarian catastrophe, made by its victims out of
the pathetic and worthless tokens paid out by their brutal oppressors. I could
wait no longer.
JC: I’m curious about your choice of
medium, using Kodak’s Aerochrome infrared film. Essentially, plants start
looking pink, and other colours shift as well, resulting in what one could call
a bubblegum palette. Is a bubblegum palette a good choice for a rather
complicated situation, about which most Westerners know very little?
RM: […] The false-colour Aerochrome was
a thing of the past. I was dealing with an abandoned technology which I wanted
to use reflexively, to work this military technology against itself in the
hopes of revealing something about how photography represents a place like
Congo, a place so deeply buried beneath and stifled by its representations.
I was
especially interested in how Aerochrome perceives and makes visible an
imperceptible part of the light spectrum. In almost all of my work I struggle
with the challenge of representing abstract or contingent phenomena that are
virtually impossible to see, or at least very difficult to put before a camera
lens. This is especially the case in Eastern Congo, where my subject was
inherently hidden. From the little I had learned about this conflict, as well
as from my past experience working in similar situations, I knew ahead of time
that my subject would elude me. Rather like Conrad's Marlow on the steamer, I
was pursuing something essentially ineffable, something so trenchantly real
that it verges on the abstract. [...] The decision to use colour infrared film
forms a dialogue with these specifics. The poetic associations carried by the
pink and red palette are a by-product of this conceptual framework, but a very
fertile one. It’s an allegorical landscape - La Vie En Rose - steeped in a kind
of magical realism.. […]
JC: Of course, there’s also the problem
that we live in the Age of Photoshop, and people might just think you simply
changed colour using a computer - which, given the growing number of
photo-manipulation discussions - might make people focus on the colours and on
whether or not what they’re seeing is actually real, instead of the actual
subject matter. Were you concerned about this?
RM: Using colour infrared film and
making Photoshop manipulations are both creative decisions. There’s nothing
more or less truthful about either of them. However, the decision to use
analogue infrared film refers to the specificity of that medium, its genesis as
a military technology, its potential to reveal the invisible, and a host of
other factors. Infra is concerned with that specificity, and a deeper
understanding of the work does require the knowledge that these images are the
result of a particular kind of film that is sensitive to infrared light.
JC: Given your choice of film it seems
you might have a problem with how conflicts in Africa or the continent itself
are usually covered. What is your take on this complex?
RM: The idea of a ‘story’ to be
‘covered’ reveals a photojournalist’s task. Journalism is extremely important
when it comes to representing conflicts. But it is not the only strategy
available. There’s a range of art forms beyond photojournalism. Since they’re
not as concretely instrumental as journalism, they give us a whole lot more
space to breathe. That’s very important because the world is a complex place.
JC: Can you talk a little more about
what you mean when you talk about art forms beyond photojournalism? What role
can art play? And needn’t we worry about art being seen as, well, art, in other
words something that’s “just made up”?
RM: I feel strongly that something that
is ‘just made up’ can speak more powerfully and more clearly than a work of
journalism.
At the end
of the day, I feel that journalism’s premise is often not simply to inform, but
also to affirm our world view. I take issue not with its informing role, but
with this affirmation. I believe that it’s imperative to challenge our
thinking, particularly in more volatile and loaded landscapes whose narratives
are frequently calcified by mass media interests. My work is not intended as a
criticism of journalism (which is tremendously important). Rather, it operates
within the open field of contemporary art, where the emphasis is not on the
answers, but on the questions - not on the facts, but on what they add up to.
Source Photographic Review
Issue 71 Summer 2012
Article: Pretty Menacing Review by Mick Gidley
Article: Pretty Menacing Review by Mick Gidley
The eleven
large digital C-Prints in this important exhibition, several of them over two
metres wide, are almost overwhelming. Both beautiful and -- partly because so
beautiful -- deeply troubling, these images were taken in 2010-11, and depict
scenes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo during a lull in the complex
conflict that ever since independence in the 1960s, but most brutally and
intractably during the Second Congo War which began in 1998, has witnessed
millions of deaths through violence and consequent famine, untold numbers of
rapes, wholesale abuse of children as armed conscripts, and virtually every
sort of corruption anyone could imagine. There is a pronounced sense of menace
to some of the images: in Colonel Soleil's Boys, for example, which in
actuality depicts the peaceful integration of rebels into the Congolese
National Army, the soldiers all look towards a sight out of shot to the right,
and while that sight might just be the officer in charge, we fear it could be
something suspect. Others -- such as Hunches in Bunches, in fact a scene of
charcoal production, with its rising smoke, stunted trees and almost palpable
signs of burning -- have the look of the aftermath of invasion. But Mosse did
not set out to document the horrors of the Congolese conflict as such, but to
represent his awareness of them, his response to them, even his impotence in
the face of them. As the helpful exhibition leaflet states, the resulting photographs
explore 'the relationship between art, fiction and photojournalism'.
What makes
these images so arresting is the richness of reds, reds where we expect green,
as if trees, bushes, savannah grasses were aflame with flowers. Thus, in the
most reproduced one, General Fevrier, the potential aggression of the young
soldier -- with his big boots and his huge rectangular wristwatch catching our
eye while he seems to be obscuring the weapon at his side -- is thoroughly
negated by the unfamiliar pinkish tone to his uniform, the soft crimson of his
beret, and, above all, the profusion of magenta foliage behind him. This
surreal effect was produced by the use of Kodak Aerochrome -- appropriately
developed for military use (the detection of targets for aerial bombing) --
which reverses colour by exposing a spectrum of light beyond the limits of
human perception. Such reversals play tricks on us: in Vintage Violence the
whites of the eyes of a posed boy soldier glow with a greenish hue, and we're
no longer sure whether that green is or isn't an effect of the process. It
isn't surprising that most previous artistic users of Aerochrome have resorted
to it because of its so-called 'psychedelic' properties. In Mosse's project, by
nature and in effect, this is the Sublime almost as defined by Edmund Burke: it
awes us, makes us uncertain, astonished, and, especially in the landscapes --
such as the Tutsi pasturelands rising to a distant horizon, or the immense lava
flow from Mt. Nyiragongo -- aware of vastness, and of our own solitude in
confronting it.
The images
suggest -- in a similar way to Joseph Conrad's evocation in Heart of Darkness
of colonial depredations in the Congo at the onset of the twentieth century --
that the very earth of the Congo is excessive and tainted, and that human
reflect its colours as much as they make them. In this respect, the politics of
the project avoids easy categorisation. The selection for this Open Eye
exhibition -- particularly the avoidance of deliberately more extreme imagery,
such as pictures of very young child soldiers or the youth with his face badly
disfigured, presumably by leprosy, as if half-consumed by his own mouth --
amounts to a good introduction to the complete Congo project, as reproduced in
Infra (2011), Mosse's stunning Aperture book. The book as a short essay by Adam
Hochschild that brilliantly unravels some of the history, politics and,
importantly, the economics of Congo conflict, thus helping to see why Mosse
depicted deforestation or mining scenes, why his pictures differentiate between
the pastoralism of the Tutsis and the arable farming of their habitual enemies,
the Hutus.
Infra also
has an essay by Mosse, in which he proves himself to be almost as articulate in
words as with the camera. In this essay, as in the revealing interview with
Aaron Schuman included in the exhibition's supplementary material, he
emphasises difficulties in both the subject and himself. He calls the Congo war
'a conflict so pathologized that is well past the point of human comprehension',
and claims his own pictures were not produced out of 'conscience', as per most
documentary, but out of 'consciousness', concluding 'My photography... was a
personal struggle with the disparity between my limited powers of
representation and the unspeakable world that confronted me'. It is entirely
appropriate that Open Eye chose to complement the Infra images not just with
three of Mosse's videos from other conflicts, including Iraq, each time
choosing to look at it obliquely (not battles, but by circling the detritus of
battle, or following the movement of frightened sheep), but also, in the
upstairs gallery, by a small selection from Simon Norfolk's better-known For
Most Of It I Have No Words, which documents the traces of genocide in memory.
Mosse's work
constitutes yet another way of seeing atrocity askance, as it were.
Paradoxically, this may be to see atrocity more deeply, because -- in having to
decipher what is before us -- we also have to acknowledge, at some level, our
complicity in it. Analogously to the manner in which Picasso's Guernica was a
response to a particular Fascist atrocity but in its incorporation of cultural,
mythological and personal symbolism endures as a generalised rendition of the
evils of war, Infra disturbs us with its allure.
Bookforum
Article: Richard Mosse’s Infra
By: Jessica Loudis
Apr/May 2012
By: Jessica Loudis
Apr/May 2012
He works
with a wooden large-format camera and Kodak Aerochrome - an infared film used
for military aerial surveillance and Jimi Hendrix album covers before it was
taken off the market two years ago - to render the Congo in a lurid hot pink
that recalls the chromatic fashions of its urban sapeur subculture.
Infra, his
first book, doesn't look like a Reuters slide show so much as an arresting
mash-up of fashion photography, mililtary surveillance stills, and psychedelic
dream imagery. Mosse breaks with the cliches of classical photojournalism, and
allows his images to take on an unreality that befits their subjects.
The New York Times
Paper Gallery, April 26, 2012
Selected text from:
Vivid Guides to Unfamiliar Landscapes
by Dana Jennings
Selected text from:
Vivid Guides to Unfamiliar Landscapes
by Dana Jennings
“Infra”
seeks to shed light on the intractable war in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
to present narratives that, Mr. Mosse writes, “urgently need telling but cannot
be easily described.” In a brilliant tactic, Mr. Mosse shot these photos using Kodak
Aerochrome,
a discontinued military aerial-surveillance film. The infrared film is extra
sensitive to green and translates the Congolese landscape into torrid pinks,
margarita blues and coral-reef fuchsias. Against this surreal backdrop we see
the war more clearly: the child soldiers, the maimed, the dead.
Art in America
June 2012 Selected text from: The New Realism by
Christian Viveros-Faune
For the
Irish photographer Richard Mosse, "Art has the potential to reflect our
difficult world, shifting the way we see, the way we understand, and can have a
cumulative and profound effect on consciousness."10 Mosse evokes the
intractable conflict in eastern Congo with Conrad-like complexity, employing
the hot pinks and fuchsias provided by Aerochrome, a disused infrared film once
developed for surveillance by the U.S. military. His landscape and portrait
photographs, often shot with an obsolete wooden field camera, are at once
realistic and hallucinatory. They are essentially vibrant, gorgeous pictures of
hell on earth.
Captured
visions of a real-life nightmare that has been notoriously hard to fathom,
Mosse's frankly esthetic images problematize photography, deftly turning his
medium's falsehoods (the red appearance of green hills and valleys, for
example) into human certainties (those very pastoral-looking landscapes are the
setting of massacres and hide actual blood underfoot). Mosse's work reveals
what remains invisible to photographers who record only what the camera sees
with its "naked lens." Expanding out from conventional realism, his
efforts to represent the unrepresentable break through the apathy often associated
with photographs of unrelenting misery. According to Mosse, art "can help
us begin to describe, and thereby account for, what exists at the limits of
human articulation."
DLK Collection
Article: Richard Mosse’s Infra
By DLK
December 5, 2011
By DLK
December 5, 2011
Richard
Mosse's new images of the conflict in the eastern Congo push the definitional
edges of photojournalism in both clever and confrontational ways. His
photographs simultaneously operate on intertwined levels of documentary truth
and artistic interpretation, mixing a reporter's eye for the facts of the story
and an artist's eye for the mood.
Stripped of
their color, Mosse's pictures would seem similar to images of war and
rebellion that we see everyday: charismatic rebel leaders in fatigues
surrounded by rag tag bunches of soldiers, the fight slipping in and out
of the jungle, ravaging the countryside and then disappearing like a wisp of
smoke. But the challenge is to get beyond these semi-posed units, the makeshift
camps, and the military marches through the undergrowth to capture the
disorienting, emotional landscape of the shifting alliances, the wins and
losses, the destructive impact on the local people and the land itself, and the
general inexplicable gruesomeness of it all. Like Conrad's The Heart of
Darkness, Mosse's body of work takes the real and makes it exaggerated and
surreal.
What is so
obviously different and shockingly new here is Mosse' palette. Using
discontinued Kodak Aerochrome infrared film, he has transformed dense
pockets of jungle greenery and wide pastoral hillsides into a topsy-turvy
Dr. Seuss world, where pink and red have become the dominant colors. River
valleys, steep rock slides and undulating pastures are seemingly covered
with bushes of cotton candy and hills of bubblegum. Soldiers wear pink berets
and stand in towering undergrowth reminiscent of bright red Christmas
pointsettas. The photographs are both joltingly wrong and quite beautiful,
forcing the viewer to look again and again, trying to make sense of what is
being presented. And this, of course, is the point; it's impossible to go down
the rabbit hole of the Congo and have the situation seem normal or
comprehensible. Even simple grazing cows look alien and out of place.
While
I admire the eye-popping, memorable distinctiveness of these images, I
think Mosse's expansion of his photojournalistic boundaries is even more
important. He has used unexpected color reversal as a metaphorical device, a
method for providing a sense of the place that goes beyond the visual details
caught on film. While his war-time compositions may look familiar, the entire
aesthetic experience is unsettling and perplexing, undermining our ability to
derive answers or draw conclusions. The wild palette tells us that we have
entered an alternate reality of some kind, and that things are not what they
seem. In the end, this inversion seems both highly appropriate and durably
original, and I am confident that these images will continue to stand out for
many years to come, instantly recognizable as the uncertainty of rebel warfare,
stunningly turned on its head.
Africa Is A Country
Article: Queering The Congo
By Neelika Jayawardane
November 21, 2011
By Neelika Jayawardane
November 21, 2011
War
photography forces us to ask questions about the limits of cultivating empathy
via looking, and the limits of seeing self in the other when the image before
us intimates something so violently different from the life experiences of the
viewer. The troubling ethical questions that surround photographing conflict
are centered around the attempt, by the photographer, to evoke a responsiveness
for the distressed people within the photographs from the readers of these
images – those who are almost never the subjects in the photographs, who are
hardly ever ‘one’ with the subjects. Moreover, war photography often exploits
our aversion and attraction to violence: when we see images of semi-starved
people fleeing from burning homes, or eyes enlarged with terror, we are
accosted by a double impulse: to simultaneously glare voyeuristically, and to
look away.
Photography
depicting danger to human habitation, the worst of human depravity, and the
hell holes of the world where every breath signifies the precarious of all that
which the viewer regards as sacred is meant to engage those whose safe lives
are in stark contrast to such instability. Such images are meant to engage
evoke both our awareness of the discord and difference between our lives and
theirs; yet, they trigger uncanny feelings of familiarity. Inevitably, we
ponder harrowing questions about our desire to regard such violations, while
receiving a grotesque sort of sublime pleasure. Small wonder, then, that
image-makers of warfare, who make a living out of constructing “statement
photographs” of scarred lands and hopeless bodies, are often critiqued for the
vicariousness and predatory nature of their photography. In the end, we are
left wondering about the photographer’s (and the audience’s) complicity in
brutalising those who are already in precarious positions by our intrusion into
intimate, violent moments in their lives.
It is with
all this disquiet about regarding the pain of others that I look with great
wonder at Richard Mosse’s
Infrared images of eastern Congo, taken with Kodak’s colour infrared film,
Aerochrome. The film, Mosse explains, “was developed during the Cold War, in
collaboration with the U.S. military, to read the landscape, detecting enemy
infrastructure,” and to render camouflage useless, thereby allowing the user to
detect enemy positions in areas of dense vegetation. Civilians like
“cartographers, agronomists, foresters hydrologists, glaciologists, and
archaeologists” became fast friends of Aerochrome; soon thereafter, in the
1960s, its usage disintegrated into the world of kitschy psychedelic album art.
But the word
psychedelic, Mosse points out, is tied to its Greek root: a soul-manifesting
experience. What Aerochrome conveys, in Mosse’s hands, is that manifestation of
souls, in profane places, within profane bodies that we may believe to be
devoid of the sacred. The quietness of the eloquent tremors delivered by his
photographs may only communicate disturbing doses of aesthetic pleasure to
those expecting the obvious shocks that are the bread-and-butter of statement
photography. What we get, instead, is the photographer’s invitation to us, the
observer, to go beyond being told what to think by the black and white of the
newsreel and charity speech. But because the images “disorder the aesthetics of
conflict,” notes artist Mary Walling Blackburn in an exchange with critical
theorist A.B. Huber, they make us ask further questions about the “ethical
dimensions” of suspending “the real”; we worry that the campiness conveyed by
all that abundant pink, and the sublime escapism possible with beautifying the ugly
are “modes of political disengagement,” precisely because “the surreal quality
of these images respond to our desire to be distracted from trauma at the
moment of engagement, to float near, but not be engulfed” by the real (in
Triple Canopy, “The
Flash Made Flesh”).
Much of
Mosse’s work sits apart from what was globally visible about the conflict in
the eastern Congo. Mosse’s use of Aerochrome attempts to engineer new ways of
looking at the eastern Congo and its conflicts, beyond meaning-denuded
statistics about the three million deaths, and what often seem like repetitive,
boilerplate stories aimed for a ‘Western audience. Mosse writes, in the essay
introduction to his new book Infra:
Photographs by Richard Mosse, 2011, “I felt Aerochrome would provide me
with a unique window through which to survey the battlefield of eastern Congo.
Realism described in infrared becomes shrouded by the exotic, shifting the
gears of Orientalism.” It is the very ability to “shift” the photographer’s and
the viewer’s Orientalist “gears” – those inevitable set of images, words, and
conflicting emotions towards which our minds grind, the moment we hear the
name, “Congo” – that allows Aerochrome’s scarlet and pink dyes to manifest soul
where there appears to be darkness.
Mosse argues
that while the word “surreal” is perhaps an accurate term for the infrared
representation of the Congo, “as it exists beneath realism (infra means below,
beneath) … any reading must also take account of this particular colour
infrared film’s genesis as a military reconnaissance / aerial surveillance
technology, an essentially western technology developed to fight a kind of
warfare that is fundamentally scientific, which operates on the premise of
“knowledge is power” (first instance of this idea was in Hobbes), a technology
developed specifically for the gathering of intelligence.”
He writes,
also, of the discoveries he made of his abilities, and where his attention took
him as a photographer:
One of the
great surprises of my work in Congo was the discovery of my own interest in
portrait photography, which I had never previously attempted. There was
something about making portraits of rebels in eastern Congo in which the
subject seemed very clearly to resist the camera’s objectification. Making
portraits of these people was often a sort of face-off confrontation, in which
the subject (not just rebels, but also villagers) seems clearly violated by the
lens at the same moment that they adjust their posture to pose for the
photograph. I found this resistance fascinating, as it seemed to highlight the
subject-object relation of photographer and photographed. There’s a certain
vulnerability revealed by the subject’s stony defiance of the camera’s gaze in
images such as General Fevrier or Tutsi town, which I feel only serves to
emphasize the authorial hand, and its objectification of the other, like a European
child pointing his finger at a black man in a provincial German supermarket
(something I witnessed last week).
Whatever
Mosse comments upon is arrived at through the picturesque nature of the infra
images, and observer’s engagement with the subtleties carried within the beauty
of the photographs. While many other war photographers direct the world’s
attention to the spectacular moments of a conflict, collective grief for lives
lost, or the massive aftermath of damage to structures, Mosse’s images capture
what appears to be a near peaceful aftermath – the lonely remainders of
domination and fear. The images contain little of the aggrandisation of
aggression, even when the soldiers pose and posture; instead, as A.H. Huber
explains, the use of Aerochrome “makes vivid” the ways in which “cruelty can be
sublime, and violence can ravage and remake a landscape in ways we may
politically detest but also find visually arresting, even beautiful…[the
photographs] arrest us as viewers, and in doing so interrupt our habits of
perception.” Huber argues further,
I think
photographs always simplify and falsify the world they show us, but Mosse’s
Congo photographs also expose something of the instability and contingency of
our perception. And yes, in this way Mosse keeps faith with a kind of queer
critique, the hallmark of which is the impulse to make the power of objective
claims visible: What is real, and who decides? The stakes are high when we are
dealing with histories of violence, where one never knows if the devil of
disbelief might outshout the devil of indifference.
When I first
read Huber’s analysis of how Mosse maintains “faith with a kind of queer
critique,” I couldn’t let go of that idea. What does it mean to “queer”
something? How does that upset/reconfigure – beginning with sexuality/gender,
but in other arenas, too? William B. Turner, in A Genealogy of Queer Theory
writes that queer theory emerged out of feminist theory and critical theory,
“with a focus on the investigation of foundational, seemingly indisputable
concepts, particularly with an eye to tracing the historical development of
those concepts and their contributions of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ such that the
differences of power along those axes of identity pervade our culture at a
level that resists fulsomely the ministrations of political action
conventionally defined” (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2000, p. 3).
My Theory
Uncle in Denver, Colorado adds, “At its most banal level, queer theory would
interrogate what constitutes a picnic and what are the threads of identity,
power, representation, gender, and sexual practice / identity that constitutes
a picnic. And maybe that wouldn’t be so banal after all,” because, as a
tool to interrogate the axes of power, desire, identity, gender, sexual practice,
representation and sexual identity, Queer Theory helps us ask seminal questions
about “how certain forms of difference become acceptable bases for the most
violent expressions of prejudice while others do not,” or, “In other words,
what sorts of differences matter?”
It is that
desire to investigate “seemingly indisputable concepts,” tracing “the
differences in power” which allows Queer Theory to “resist fulsomely”
conventional definitions. Mosse was also able to latch on to the idea that both
technique and technology would permit a revelation of conventions; in fact, he
understood, instinctively, that a technology meant to harrow into shadow
spaces, revealing all that one deliberately secrets away, could, instead,
expose the closeted anxieties of the looker.
One of the
troubling aspects of his journey as a photographer has been the upset his
infrared work causes, offending “sensibilities on both sides of the spectrum,”
writes Mosse. First, “dyed-in-the-wool reportage photographers,” the old guard
of photojournalism, often seem to find the infrared colour palette in this work
to be a flagrant violation of the “rules of photojournalism.” Certain war
photographers “dismiss the work outright,” which makes Mosse wonder whether
they are simply busy with “the guardianship of realism.” Along with the umbrage
caused to the traditions of photojournalism, he also runs into the issue of who
should have the right to represent, “as if representation was territorial,” and
he were “trespassing,” Mosse writes. The question is whether a European man –
and Irish man – can accurately speak for the Congolese. Certain discussions
have “swiftly became heated and accusatory.” He countered these heated
questions by asking whether Steve McQueen may go to Belfast to make Hunger, “a
film about “my” Irish troubles? Doesn’t he know that only the Irish are allowed
to represent the troubles?” Mosse counters that the territoriality surrounding
representation of the Other is deeply problematic, precisely because such
protestations do not take into account why “fresh opinions of [an] outsider’s
perspective might offer new ways to understand the old calcified clichés.”
The essay by
Adam Hochschild in Infra gives us the “just the facts” version of Congo’s
history, with the variations of history that most Americans do not like to
incorporate as ‘real’ history; he begins with King Leopold of Belgium’s early
venture into making an area of land almost as big as the United States into his
personal colony – and of Joseph Conrad’s vivid, and memorable account of the
unspeakable ‘horror’ he encountered, five years into Leopold’s ravages. We also
learn about how the Belgian government, realising that the decimated population
could no longer produce as desired by their colonial master, gave the Congolese
better health care and educations – but not too much education. So controlled
was the level of knowledge permitted by Begium that by the time of
independence, there were no Congolese “trained as engineers, agronomists,
doctors, or army officers. Of some five-thousand management level positions in
the civil service, only three were filled by Africans.” The U.S. is not simply
implicated, but indicted: “Less than two months after the new prime minister
[Patrice Lumumba] took power, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the
CIA to have him assassinated,” and then, proceeded to ensure that the U.S.’s
“investments were protected” by a billion-dollar system of aid that only served
to maintain their ally, Mobutu Sese Seko.
Next to (and
together) with Hochschild’s, Mosse’s own narrative is deeply illuminating: some
of the things that I felt conflicted about, as I looked at his photographs for
the first time in the British newspaper, The Guardian, are explored here. He
approaches, with honesty, what it means to arrive as an outsider to Congo, and
to continue to be a reincarnation of “Marlow”: without the adequate means of
comprehending the visual and linguistic signs, then turning to the surreal as a
possibility. While Hochschild’s words provides a sort of reassurance – yes,
this wordless horror, too, is representable – Mosse’s exploration admits to
succumbing to the classical Conradian “horror” initially, and the wordlessness
of encountering all that we regard as Other: the inhuman, the pointlessness of
such abject brutality and suffering, and the lack of clear binaries and
possible solutions.
Like more
illustrious scholars like Chinua Achebe, I have also made it my business to
critique the “preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to
the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind,” wherein Africa
is used “as setting and backdrop…as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all
recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his
peril…[thusly] eliminate[ing] the African as human factor.” In Achebe’s seminal
critique of Conrad (and the general European inability to word Africa and the
African), he does not have a problem with European ambivalence towards the
colonising mission and the colonial officers’ aversion to their own
“civilisation.” His quarrel is, in actuality, with those who attempt to resolve
this discomfort by removing Africans of their full and complex humanity. I, and
other critics after Achebe have suspected that for Conrad and his narrator, the
wordless horror he experienced was more of an indication of internal processes
concerning the havoc he saw, in which he now recognises himself as a small
tool – the root of which was intimately tied to consumption and amalgamation of
power over supply. Projecting that horror on to the Other has been a part of a
long tradition of European (and probably others’) conquest.
In Mosse’s
photography, what I note is the possibility of re-visioning that which appears
to be horror/wordless. So it’s almost as if we need to have it “queered” in
order to see anything in a morass of signals. The infra-work draws attention to
the Otherness, and removes difference at the same time without succumbing to a
cheesy sort of “We are the World” mirroring technique. Here, we have to live
within the grey (or the pink) of simultaneously recognising the
impossibility/Otherness of this place, and actually seeing the human actions
there, doing things in a very logical fashion.
Mosse
writes, in an email communiqué, that he is “particularly drawn to these ideas
of ‘the wordless horror’ that I identified in Marlow. He directs me to Elaine
Scarry’s The Body in Pain for an elaboration on the prelinguistic, guttural
failure to communicate the experiences of pain. For Mosse, these verbal
failures are related to the “abject failure of the dumb optic of photography to
describe a complex conflict situation…this failure was most acute when
photographing the pastoral landscape of Tutsi highlands [recreated in the
eastern Congo], the cattle at dusk, which makes only for beautiful and
seemingly reassuring and peaceful imagery but should in fact speak volumes
about the land conflict currently unfolding, the deforestation, the poisoning
of primeval jungle, and the destructive encroachment of Rwandan pastoralists
onto a Congolese landscape.” This litany of disparities “between what the lens
reveals, or is able to say, and what is actually at stake” is what Mosse
identifies as the “problem with my own technique, the procrustean aspect of
Kodachrome, which I seek to violate.”
One can
speak easily in clichés about infrared images: how seeing something in infrared
light conjures up the magical ability to see the familiar as Other, making the
obvious into the uncanny. Under the manufactured surrealism created by
Aerochrome, everything we see is near bubble-gum delightful – grotesquely so.
Here, conflict over the right to dominate over land, mineral rights, and access
to sex is washed over by waves of unexpected rose, splotches of scarlet. But
there’s something more aesthetically electrifying within Mosse’s images, beyond
the shock of seeing rolling, terraced hillsides as flawless as those Sri Lankan
tea-growing highlands with which I am familiar, snaking turquoise rivers, human
encampments surrounded by the abundance of banana leaves, and
machine-gun-toting soldiers who appear to be clad in campy pink fatigues. We
begin by imagining that darkness to be in the external location of the
geographical and psychosocial world that is Congo; but soon enough, as Conrad
himself recognized on his famous fictional journey down the great river, that
darkness is ours, rather than an external manifestation of horror.
Aperture Magazine
Issue 203 Summer 2011
Article: Sublime Proximity: In Conversation with Richard Mosse
Interview by Aaron Schuman
Article: Sublime Proximity: In Conversation with Richard Mosse
Interview by Aaron Schuman
Front cover
of Aperture Magazine issue 203 summer 2011 showing Colonel Soleil’s Boys,
North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2010
Over the
course of the last seven years, Irish photographer Richard Mosse has
photographed postwar ruins in the former Yugoslavia, cities devastated by
earthquake in Iran, Pakistan, and Haiti, the occupied palaces of Saddam
Hussein, airport emergency training simulators, the rusting wreckage of remote
air disasters, nomadic rebels in the Congolese jungle, and more. Reading
through his catalog of subject matter, one could easily assume that Mosse is an
inveterate photojournalist in the most traditional sense, chasing hard facts in
order to illustrate breaking news. Yet through his work—generally photographed
in large format and presented large scale, with a penchant for the staggering,
the allusive, the historical, and the Sublime—Mosse is revealed as a
practitioner intent on challenging the orthodoxies of documentary photography,
in particular the contexts, imperatives, and “responsibilities” that are often
both assumed by and imposed upon the documentary genre, and indeed upon the
photographic medium as a whole. —A.S.
AARON
SCHUMAN: How did
you first become interested in photography?
RICHARD
MOSSE: I come
from a family of artists. My grandfather was a sculptor, my uncle is a painter,
and my mother studied at Cooper Union under Hans Haacke, so becoming an artist
was very natural. My parents are potters, and photography seemed like a kind of
antidote to that., Its light-sensitive simulation is at a far remove from
ceramics so I took to it at an early age. Shards of pottery that were formed
from earth by hand will outlive us all, unlike photographs, which will perish
in the sunlight that they once traced. Photography allowed me to be an artist
without working in anyone’s shadow. That’s especially the case in Ireland where
the medium is not so celebrated, in spite of seminal work by Willie Doherty,
Paul Seawright, Donovan Wylie, and others.
Initially I
was drawn to cinema as a teenager, and became obsessed with the French New
Wave. But I found the military-style hierarchy of working in a film crew
unsatisfying, so gave up filmmaking and concentrated on my degree in English
literature. I dug deeper into a career in academia, getting a Masters in Cultural
Studies at a left-field institution called the London Consortium—a research
body formed in the interstices between the University of London, Tate, the
Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), and the Architectural Association.
Studying there gave me the freedom to integrate my own photographs into a
written examination of the postwar Balkan landscape, and things evolved from
there.
AS: How did that academic experience
influence your subsequent pursuit of photography?
RM: I think it’s important that
photography is cut through with other disciplines and a wider understanding of
the world. Though I loved spending my days in the university’s library, a life
in academia seemed removed from lived experience. I wanted to be a maker rather
than a critic, a producer rather than a consumer. Photography is an engagement
with the world of things, and it has given me a genuine pretext to travel
widely and experience what James Joyce called “good warm life.” I’m most
excited when there’s an elision of the critical and the creative in my work, so
I haven’t discarded my academic foundations. Instead I try to build on them.
AS: The first time we corresponded, in
2003, you quoted Sol LeWitt: “When words such as painting and sculpture are
used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this
tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to
make art that goes beyond limitations.” You then wrote: “Yet I've always
insisted on using photography. I think something is about to shift.” Has this
“shift” occurred yet—for you, or for photography in general?
RM: At the time I wrote that I was
working at Art Monthly, a British art magazine. I wasn’t yet fully practicing
as an artist. I was the listings editor, consuming gallery press releases all
day long—the best art education possible. Sol LeWitt’s statement now seems
slightly tautological. Perhaps a better quote to answer your question might be
from Robert Adams: “Photographers have generally been held to a different set
of responsibilities than have painters and sculptors, chiefly because of the
widespread supposition the photographers want to and can give us objective
Truth: the word ‘documentary’ has abetted the prejudice. But does a
photographer really have less right to arrange life into a composition, into
form, than a painter or sculptor?”
Where LeWitt
uses the word traditions, Adams says responsibilities. How much more limiting
are your traditions when they are saturated with a moral imperative? The
photographer is expected to be “responsible,” but responsible to whom?
Documentary photographers whose work bears some relation to photojournalism are
particularly constrained. Their expressive arteries have been hardened by years
of World Press Photo Awards and the shadow of the intrepid photojournalist
sporting a scarf and a Leica. Where would we be if Robert Frank had hidden his
Leica in a scarf?
AS: So do you see your work as part of
an evolution of photojournalism? And if so, when you find yourself at a hotel
bar in Baghdad or Beirut, surrounded by traditional photojournalists, what
discussions take place? I know that you’ve got the dusty, weathered boots . . .
surely you must have a scarf and a Leica in your wardrobe somewhere as well?
RM: I found myself in Haiti this
spring, shooting for a news magazine. It was my first editorial commission, and
I ended up back at the hotel bar each night deeply confused, trying to
reconcile my instincts with what I felt was expected of me by the editors. Two
photojournalists—Jake Price and Scout Tufankjian—rallied to my side. They
pointed out that the editors only wanted me to do exactly what I do; they
wouldn’t have hired me otherwise. It was so simple, but I couldn’t see that
without their help. I find working alongside photojournalists can be very inspiring.
They work incredibly hard and are deeply committed. They also make excellent
drinking partners.
AS: How do you decide upon your
subject matter—is it driven by research and theory, which then leads to a
search for the physical manifestations of your underlying idea in the real
world, or vice versa?
RM: My process is very intuitive. The
idea must come first, but the process of making the work becomes a pursuit of
that idea—a “quest,” or more usually a kind of staggering picaresque narrative.
My journeys are often very problematic, unplanned, and full of failure. For
example, earlier this year I wanted to use a highly unstable infrared film
technology as a way of thinking through the conflict in Congo. My concept was
very raw and underdeveloped. Embarking upon the journey, I found myself
challenged in many ways, not least because I had no knowledge of moving through
this difficult land, and no experience of using this type of film. I was
dealing with the unknown, negotiating my own ignorance. Since infrared light is
invisible to the human eye, you could say that I was literally photographing
blind. As soon as I arrived in Congo I had crossed a threshold into fiction,
into my own symbolic order. Yet I was trying to represent something that is
tragically real—an entrenched and endless conflict fought in a jungle by
nomadic rebels of constantly shifting allegiances.
The actual
situation that I discovered in Congo became folded into the initial idea, and I
began to find ways to interpret what I encountered on my journey through this
conceptual, logistical, and technical precariousness. Over time, these failures
became synthesized into a kind of epiphany. I had privately reached a kind of
messianic state where I could no longer perceive the absurdity of my task. So
the research and theory adhere to, and become ramified by, an initial driving
intuition.
AS: Your work bears more than a slight
resemblance to artistic movements that directly preceded the invention of
photography, such as Romanticism and history painting. These movements were
eventually overtaken by Realism in the nineteenth century, and photography—as
both a technology and medium—seems to have, until recently, been aligned more
with Realism than with Romanticism. Do you think that a Romantic approach to
photography is appropriate within contemporary practice?
RM: Photographic realism has become so
inscribed upon twentieth-century depictions of war that we often forget that
there were other forms before it: the panorama, the history painting, even 3-D spectroscopic
views of the battlefield. In the past, this is how the public understood their
wars—as distant sweeping landscapes of enormous scale and detail. I feel that
early war photographers like Mathew Brady and Roger Fenton were influenced by
these precedents. But they were soon forgotten with small-format technologies,
and with changes in the way that wars were fought during the twentieth century.
Warfare is constantly evolving; it has recently become abstracted, asymmetric,
simulated. We are so removed from the experience of war in the West that I feel
the genre may shift once more. The realist forms that were so powerful
throughout the twentieth century may now be obsolescent.
In my
practice, I struggle with the challenge of representing abstract or contingent
phenomena. The camera’s dumb optic is intensely literal, yet the world is far
from being simple or transparent. Air disasters, terrorism, the simulated
nature of modern warfare, the cultural interface between an occupying force and
its enemy, the martyr drive in Islamic extremism, the intangibility of Eastern
Congo’s conflict—these are all subjects that are very difficult to express with
traditional documentary realism; they are difficult to perceive in their own
right. Very often I am fighting simply to represent the subject, just to find a
way to put it before the lens, or make it visible by its very absence. This
process is inherently “Romantic” because it often requires a retreat into my
own imagination, into my own symbolic order.
But the real
is central to my interests, as it’s something that eludes conventional genres,
particularly Realism. The real is at the heart of contemporary global anxiety;
proximity to the real is endured by us all. But I feel that the real is only
effectively communicated through shocks to the imagination, precipitated by the
Sublime. That may seem like an archaic term, but what I’m referring to here is
contemporary art’s unique ability to make visible what cannot be perceived,
breaching the limits of representation.
AS: When you first arrive at a
location—a U.S. military base, a Congolese village, etcetera—and explain your
intentions, what’s the response?
RM: I’m always surprised by how
generous people are when they encounter my photographic handicap, the view
camera. The people on the ground who watch me set up my tripod and unfold my
bellows are generally more aware of the significance of my subject than I am.
The problems are usually encountered further up the line, with press officers,
spokesmen, lawyers, corrupt officials, red tape. My journeys occasionally lead
me into abject situations and Groundhog Day–style cul-de-sacs. For example, on
a recent trip to Ethiopia my guide got us lost on the Eritrean border, a recent
war zone. Our vehicle’s four-wheel-drive malfunctioned, and the engine
overheated constantly. The driver stopped every half-hour to pour tinned tomato
puree into the radiator to cool it down. Then we were tricked by Afar tribesmen
with Kalashnikovs into taking the wrong road, which we traveled for days,
ending up in a refugee camp. My crew feared potential intertribal violence so
we decided to sleep in the police station. When we finally approached our
destination the Land Cruiser’s tires got stuck in the desert sand, the seven
armed guards who were traveling with us started to fight with the cook, the
driver fell asleep, and our guide began to pray. I had to dig the vehicle out
of the sand. We never reached our destination.It was an invigorating jaunt, but
not a sustainable way of life.
AS: In the past two decades, there has
been a wave of what is often referred to as “aftermath” photography. Would you
regard your own work as a part of this movement?
RM: Aftermath photography took
everything interesting about the New Topographics and turned it into a movie
set. Thankfully, there’s a place for these photographers . . . it’s called
Detroit.
AS: But how do you differentiate your
images of Iraqi or Serbian ruins from those of the many photographers who have
flocked to Detroit or post-Katrina New Orleans to photograph debris with heavy
tripods and large-format cameras?
RM: Guilty as charged. Although even
if some of my work is similar in form to aftermath photography, I do feel there
is a distinct difference in both my approach and intent.
For the
Romantic poets, the ruin carried tremendous allegorical power, and that power
resounds today in contemporary photography. Perhaps the ruin’s absent totality
signifies something very different to us now than it did back then—its timeless
resonance shifts for each generation. Nevertheless, we are still drawn to the
same imagery that Caspar David Friedrich was. I’m not so sure that we’re always
honest with ourselves about this fascination.
The thing
that strikes me about a lot of aftermath photography is the moral high ground
that the photographers often take. Their journey into darkness becomes a kind
of “performance of the ethical”; witnessing the catastrophe becomes an act of
piety, of noblesse oblige, when in fact it’s nothing of the sort. I would
imagine that most aftermath photography is really just an artist’s quest to
find meaning and authenticity through extreme tourism. I’m reminded of the
poète maudit, the Romantic antihero who will go to the ends of the earth and
transgress all moral boundaries for the ultimate aesthetic experience. This
irresponsible, self-destructive rogue was best embodied in the crapulent,
wayward lives of artists like Arthur Rimbaud or Paul Gauguin. The
“responsibilities” that Robert Adams complained about, abetted by the
documentary, seem to preclude the maudit in photography.
AS: Is the notion of “spectacle”
important to you?
RM: Last summer I found myself
trespassing in an abandoned, war-damaged hotel near Dubrovnik. I tinkered about
this Brutalist ruin with my camera, finding various Yugoslav relics from 1991,
the year that the hotel became a front line in the fighting between Serb
snipers and Croat militias. Then, as I was making my way through the wreckage,
I noticed a modern cruise ship anchored in the nearby waters. This huge luxury vessel
mirrored the hotel in form; the parallel between the two vast structures was
uncanny, and I began to think about their relationship. Placed alongside each
other, what sort of dialogue did they open up? The cruise ship, I reasoned, is
an unmoored signifier of globalization par excellence, its tourists comfortably
numb within their air-conditioned matrix, blissfully ignorant of the traces of
war facing them on the cliff. The ruined hotel, on the other hand, spoke of
local tribal enmities, of painful regional memories, of conflict and war. I
meandered to the conclusion that perhaps war is the only remaining hurdle
standing in the way of global amnesia; perhaps war is the only thing that
redeems historical narratives in the face of this leveling of identity.
These
thoughts followed me back to New York, where I developed the rolls of film that
I’d shot in Croatia. On my contact sheets I discovered one image depicting
shattered mirrored steps, broken beer bottles, fake flowers, and a hangman’s
noose on a dusty ballroom floor. This photograph seemed to mock my fallacious
theory about war, memory and the consequences of globalization. I’d dreamed
that the evocative ruin represented an alternative to the society of the
spectacle—that I’d trespassed in the forbidden wreckage of the real. I
flattered that afternoon’s adventure as some sort of original transgression of
the spectacular. But the souvenir document that I’d returned with reminded me
that the hotel’s bombed-out ballrooms were also the occasional haunt of local
ravers. International DJs come with smoke machines and strobe lights and use
the place as an exotic live venue, appropriating its authentic war remnants as
a stage for hipsters to celebrate their alienation.
I was
reminded of Guy Debord’s words. The spectacle, he writes, “is the sun which
never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of
the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.”
GUP Magazine
Issue 28, the conflict issue
Article: A Conversation with Richard Mosse
Interview by Joerg Colberg
Article: A Conversation with Richard Mosse
Interview by Joerg Colberg
Front and
rear covers showing detail of Tutsi Town, North Kivu, Eastern DRC, 2010
On the
following pages you will see Richard Mosse's Infra, a remarkable work in
progress of what we tend to casually refer to as the conflict in Congo. Why go
there? Why use colour infrared film? Jörg Colberg, founder and editor of
Conscientious, a website dedicated to contemporary fine-art photography, asked
him.
Jörg
Colberg: Let me
start off by asking why/how you decided to take photographs of Eastern Congo?
How did your interest in the region develop?
Richard
Mosse: Congo is
regarded as one of the first places in which photography became a powerful
humanitarian force. Around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, there was a
watershed of concern surrounding the Belgian monarch, King Leopold II’s
personal abuse of power in the region. This was simultaneous with the rise of
photography within mass media. Two English missionaries, Alice Seeley and John
Harris, left for the Congo Free State in 1896 and photographed the brutal human
rights violations that they witnessed there. This and other portrayals of the
region’s horrors eventually brought an end to Leopold’s claim to Congo. But the
misery continued.
Also at work
at this time was Joseph Conrad, a steamboat captain along the mighty Congo
River in the early 1890s. Conrad wrote a short novel about his experience,
Heart of Darkness. [...] To this day, Congo seems caught in the wake of
Conrad’s steamboat. In the western popular imagination, the place is often
regarded as touched by madness, darkness and cannibalism. The conflict’s recent
disturbing turn towards gang rape and sexual terror, exacerbated by the United
Nation’s ineffective and convoluted bureaucracy, only adds to the region’s
reputation as Breughelesque and incomprehensible, echoing Mistah Kurtz’s the
horror, the horror.
Wandering
through the Menil Collection in Houston I was fascinated by Congolese statues
that had been studded with metal nails fashioned in waves. Looking at them, I
remembered that the slaves on Conrad’s steamboat had been paid in rivets - a
kind of placebo currency invented by the Belgians. Here before me, I realised,
were complex and challenging aesthetic forms made from these useless iron
slivers. I checked the date and it tallied with Conrad’s visit to the Congo
Free State. Here was ‘primitive’ aesthetic virtuosity, exceptional works of art
produced in the midst of a humanitarian catastrophe, made by its victims out of
the pathetic and worthless tokens paid out by their brutal oppressors. I could
wait no longer.
JC: I’m curious about your choice of
medium, using Kodak’s Aerochrome infrared film. Essentially, plants start
looking pink, and other colours shift as well, resulting in what one could call
a bubblegum palette. Is a bubblegum palette a good choice for a rather
complicated situation, about which most Westerners know very little?
RM: […] The false-colour Aerochrome was
a thing of the past. I was dealing with an abandoned technology which I wanted
to use reflexively, to work this military technology against itself in the
hopes of revealing something about how photography represents a place like
Congo, a place so deeply buried beneath and stifled by its representations.
I was
especially interested in how Aerochrome perceives and makes visible an
imperceptible part of the light spectrum. In almost all of my work I struggle
with the challenge of representing abstract or contingent phenomena that are
virtually impossible to see, or at least very difficult to put before a camera
lens. This is especially the case in Eastern Congo, where my subject was
inherently hidden. From the little I had learned about this conflict, as well
as from my past experience working in similar situations, I knew ahead of time
that my subject would elude me. Rather like Conrad's Marlow on the steamer, I
was pursuing something essentially ineffable, something so trenchantly real
that it verges on the abstract. [...] The decision to use colour infrared film
forms a dialogue with these specifics. The poetic associations carried by the
pink and red palette are a by-product of this conceptual framework, but a very
fertile one. It’s an allegorical landscape - La Vie En Rose - steeped in a kind
of magical realism.. […]
JC: Of course, there’s also the problem
that we live in the Age of Photoshop, and people might just think you simply
changed colour using a computer - which, given the growing number of
photo-manipulation discussions - might make people focus on the colours and on
whether or not what they’re seeing is actually real, instead of the actual
subject matter. Were you concerned about this?
RM: Using colour infrared film and
making Photoshop manipulations are both creative decisions. There’s nothing
more or less truthful about either of them. However, the decision to use
analogue infrared film refers to the specificity of that medium, its genesis as
a military technology, its potential to reveal the invisible, and a host of
other factors. Infra is concerned with that specificity, and a deeper
understanding of the work does require the knowledge that these images are the
result of a particular kind of film that is sensitive to infrared light.
JC: Given your choice of film it seems
you might have a problem with how conflicts in Africa or the continent itself
are usually covered. What is your take on this complex?
RM: The idea of a ‘story’ to be
‘covered’ reveals a photojournalist’s task. Journalism is extremely important
when it comes to representing conflicts. But it is not the only strategy
available. There’s a range of art forms beyond photojournalism. Since they’re
not as concretely instrumental as journalism, they give us a whole lot more
space to breathe. That’s very important because the world is a complex place.
JC: Can you talk a little more about
what you mean when you talk about art forms beyond photojournalism? What role
can art play? And needn’t we worry about art being seen as, well, art, in other
words something that’s “just made up”?
RM: I feel strongly that something that
is ‘just made up’ can speak more powerfully and more clearly than a work of
journalism.
At the end
of the day, I feel that journalism’s premise is often not simply to inform, but
also to affirm our world view. I take issue not with its informing role, but
with this affirmation. I believe that it’s imperative to challenge our
thinking, particularly in more volatile and loaded landscapes whose narratives
are frequently calcified by mass media interests. My work is not intended as a
criticism of journalism (which is tremendously important). Rather, it operates
within the open field of contemporary art, where the emphasis is not on the
answers, but on the questions - not on the facts, but on what they add up to.
Dazed and Confused
Nov 2010
Article: Last Shot: Richard Mosse, Infrared Film Exposes Unseen Conflicts in Eastern Congo
Interview by Sarah Fakray
Article: Last Shot: Richard Mosse, Infrared Film Exposes Unseen Conflicts in Eastern Congo
Interview by Sarah Fakray
Photo: LA
VIE EN ROSE, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2010, courtesy of the artist and
Jack Shainman Gallery
A crackly,
delayed phone connection is trying its hardest to destroy all conversation.
Calling Dazed from Syria, 30-year-old photographer Richard Mosse is driving in
a rental car with a friend who is planning a coup of the Syrian government.
Before long they are stopped by a policeman who asks where they are going, and
when he hears the destination Damascus, jumps in the back of the car – meaning
that technically this interview was conducted under police supervision. Some
people work better under pressure; Mosse thrives on conflict, and his most
recent series "Infra" documents his journey to eastern Congo this
year, where he used an infrared camera to produce psychedelic landscapes
alluding to the fact that the warring factions hiding in the jungle cannot be
seen by the human eye.
"I
thought I'd go to the Congo because it's a very unstable region and difficult
to work in, and I was looking for a challenge. I had photographed plane crashes
and Saddam's palace, made work in Gaza and Iraq, and I felt like I really
needed to change my destination away from the Middle East. The eastern Congo
was a completely impossible place to visit as a white man with a camera. There
really isn't a tourist infrastructure at all, but there's a highly developed
infrastructure of corruption targeting NGO workers or the UN, and they presume
you are part of that brigade. I got hassled on a daily basis by immigration
people, intelligence people, media people, anybody who fancied a few bucks… I
probably spent a couple thousand dollars of grant money on bribes; it was the
only way you could get around.
There was a
very specific concept behind the decision to shoot in infrared. I knew if I
went out there, I would be competing with these contingent, very abstract
phenomenon that are very difficult to represent with the camera. There was a
high chance that I would come away with a banal experience from eastern Congo,
without seeing any conflict at all. The rebels that fight the war there are
nomadic and live hidden in the jungle, so the nature of the conflict is
essentially an intangible thing. At the same time I'm using a camera, which
deals with a physical trace of the world, so you have to put something in front
of the lens in order to represent it. I was trying to make a leap into the
invisible. Infrared light can be seen by infrared film but not by the human
eye; it was a way of dealing with that intangibility.
There were
side effects that come with using infrared film I was hoping would come
through: these hallucinogenic colour palettes, which are very unusual to say
the least, and were last seen on the front cover of a Grateful Dead album. I
like that because it takes a step into the world of magical realism – it's
surprising and it challenges the viewer. A lot of hardcore conservative
photojournalists have been offended by this because they think that I am
ridiculing my subject, which is far from the case – I am very interested in the
complexity of the situation there. I'm really delighted those people in
particular are challenged and are made to question the convention and genre of
documentary photography."
British Journal of Photography
March 25 2010
Richard Mosse: La Vie En Rose
by Olivier Laurent
Visit
Photo: General Janvier, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2010
Images © Richard Mosse, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery
Ask Richard Mosse what first fascinated him about the Congo and he'll give you a long list. "Joseph Conrad. Tin Tin. The Rumble in the Jungle. The Belgian colonial legacy. The beer. The Ebola virus. A country the size of Western Europe with less paved roads than Ireland. The ‘bulletproof' Mai Mai warriors. A conflict so pathologised that it is well past the point of human comprehension."
But it's the latter reason that led the Irish-born photographer to use Kodak's Aerochrome film. Discontinued last year, the film is particularly sensitive to infra-red light, rather than to the usual visible spectrum of colours registered by traditional film. Since foliage reflects infra-red while buildings don't, the US Army used it during the Vietnam War to detect and reveal hidden soldiers. "I wanted to export this technology to a harder situation, to up-end the generic conventions of calcified mass-media narratives and challenge the way we're allowed to represent this forgotten conflict," says Mosse. "I wanted to confront this military reconnaissance technology, to use it reflexively in order to question the ways in which war photography is constructed."
Mosse was first inspired to use the film after seeing the work of Florian Maier-Aichen. "This German artist rejects the influence of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Becher school to embrace a kind of Romantic exploration of the landscape of the American West," says Mosse. "I was moved by the beauty of this work, and wondered whether he used colour infra-red film to compose certain images. I'm not sure whether he actually did, but I got excited by the technology, which is considered to be a kind of photographic taboo – thou shalt not cross-process; thou shalt not use colour infra-red film."
While Mosse refuses to reveal where he got the discontinued film - "I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you," he jokes – up until February, a small company in Germany supplied it in the 120 medium format by cutting it down from a large roll stock. However, even that supplier has now run out of the film, BJP understands. But this setback hasn't deterred Mosse from his continued interest in Congo and infra-red technology. The 30-year-old photographer plans to go back next year with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten, with whom he's worked on previous projects.
"We plan to shoot IR Red One video. That involves sending the Red One camera back to the factory where the OLPF filter will be removed from the digital sensor." The result "will be quite extraordinary and very different to the old Aerochrome stock," he says. "It will be a kind of blown-out monochrome palette. We've actually shot infra-red before in Iraq, where Trevor repurposed his Zeiss lens to peer through a US Army IR goggle eyepiece. The result was this nightmarish green-and-black palette, rather like the old DOS interface for anyone old enough to remember computer screens before Windows and the Mac Classic."
However, he says, "the IR we will shoot in Congo will probably look a lot different, rather like the moment an atom bomb detonates. The world will seem shadowless, like a breathless high-noon desert landscape, yet we'll be beating through the jungle shadows."
BLDG BLOG
Monday, December 21, 2009
Article: Leviathan: An Interview with Richard Mosse
Interview by: Geoff Manaugh
Article: Leviathan: An Interview with Richard Mosse
Interview by: Geoff Manaugh
Photographer
Richard Mosse, originally from Ireland, is a graduate of the Yale MFA program
in photography, as well as a recipient of a Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the
Performing and Visual Arts. This Fellowship has funded Mosse's ongoing and
extraordinary series of travels around the world.
Readers of
BLDGBLOG will recognize his work from its previous appearances here—whether
that's the air disaster simulations of a year or two back or the full interview
with Mosse about his, until then, unpublished photographs of Saddam Hussein's
palaces.
Having
worked together all Autumn as part of the quarantine studio here in New York,
Mosse and I coordinated another interview, via email, about his most recent
solo exhibition. That show, called The Fall, features photographs of extremely
remote airplane crash sites, with often partially dismantled or disintegrated
wrecks disappearing into an uninhabited landscape; Mosse compares these
structures to the Arctic shipwrecks and ruined forest abbeys of painter Caspar
David Friedrich. The images will be on display for only two more days—closing Wednesday,
23 December 2009—at New York's Jack Shainman Gallery.
In the
following interview, Richard Mosse discusses the visual representation of
catastrophe; conceptual links between terrorism, advertising, and photography;
the 2006 disappearance of pilot Steve Fossett; surveillance subcultures along
the U.S./Mexico border; the short fiction of J.G. Ballard; and Werner Herzog's
film Fata Morgana.
BLDGBLOG: I'd like to start off with a
fairly practical question: how do you actually locate these plane wrecks, many
of which received no media coverage at all?
Mosse: These photos are the result of
months of online research, skimming forums, YouTube videos, Google Earth,
Flickr, emailing wreck chasers, and cold-calling bush pilots. I'd even surf the
web for jpegs of plane wrecks, then bring this information into Google Earth in
the hopes of finding tiny silhouettes of downed planes. I was searching for
accidents so disintegrated and remote to civilization that they only really
exist in the virtual imagination of transient and anonymous online communities.
Others had become landmarks, a destination for the intrepid to come and leave
their trace.
Like
19th-century survey photography, it became a process of charting the
unknown—but it's also a kind of picaresque quest narrative. I think the work
has echoes of the poète maudit, the immoral artist figure who will go to any
extreme, transgressing any boundaries in pursuit of the ultimate aesthetic
experience.
BLDGBLOG: Abstractly speaking, was it that
idea of trespassing and transgression—photographing something that terrifies so
many people and that so few people actually witness or see—that drew you to
this project?
Richard
Mosse: I’m
fascinated by contemporary art’s ability to point to the limits of experience,
making visible what can't otherwise be represented. Photography, meanwhile, is
supposed to be rooted in the world of things, as it carries an actual physical
memory of the world at a specific time and place. Between these poles, I think
photography has a unique potential to represent human suffering—which is, after
all, something that cannot be represented. I cannot literally feel your pain;
you cannot adequately express that pain. Pain is an essentially private affair,
yet it is something experienced by all of us. Starting from these basic ideas,
I'm hoping to find a better way to describe the catastrophe. By this I mean a
totalizing concept of warfare, disaster, the battlefield—the things that define
our era but which have become increasingly abstract, impersonalized, invisible,
simulated and global.
So how is
the catastrophe popularly represented? Through terrorism. Terrorism is a
gesture of advertising; it’s a literary act, a form of representation, before
all else. Its aim is not primarily to kill, but to capture the popular
imagination through killing. It’s for this reason that I’m drawn to the air
disaster: there is no finer, more succinct, more international, and more
culturally loaded expression of the catastrophe than a plane crash. An airliner
in vertical descent is a spectacle of modernity's complete failure. It is
horrifying, but also aesthetically powerful—and it's for these reasons that
terrorists covet the air disaster. I feel that photographers, who work in close
proximity to advertising, can enter the terrorist’s symbolic order and violate
the same taboos.
Like the
catastrophe, the air disaster is virtually impossible to represent. After the
Continental crash near Buffalo last year, I traveled immediately to the site.
It was totally inaccessible. In only a few hours, various authorities had come
together to form a kind of firewall around the event; it had become opaque with
layers of jurisdiction.
BLDGBLOG: How did you manage to get near the
wreckage?
Mosse: The plane had crashed into a suburban
neighborhood, and state troopers were waving down the traffic about a mile or
so from the site. I parked up in the woods nearby, slung my camera and tripod
in a shoulder bag, and trespassed through people’s backyards in the hope of
being taken for a resident. I was able to walk almost to the crash site itself,
about 100 yards from the wreckage, where I stood and watched the disaster
bureaucracy arrange and rearrange itself while body bags were carried out.
Unable to
get any closer than that, and with no clear line of sight, I looked for some
trace of the disaster violating this residential idyll and found police tape
slung around trees whose branches had been broken by the crash. I set up the
tripod and within about twelve seconds the veil had closed in. First came the
local officers, and then the Feds. They kept me there for about an hour, ran my
name and social security number, and threatened me with arrest.
I began to
understand this larger project as a kind of deferral: I started to look
sideways at the air disaster through older wrecks, forgotten relics in the
middle of nowhere. There are layers of deferral here which attempt to access a
crystallization of themes surrounding the air disaster. Control. Remoteness.
Archaeology. Time. Environment. Form. Scale. Quest. The hidden. Taboo. In
making these images, I'm aiming towards something aligned in spirit with Caspar
David Friedrich's painting, Das Eismeer: spatial remoteness becomes temporal
remoteness, and the forgotten plane wreck is swallowed by the primeval
landscape.
BLDGBLOG: Friedrich's Arctic shipwreck
brings to mind a pretty incredible video that you've put together, called
Leviathan. It features wrecked airplanes emerging from, or being dropped into,
the sea. Can you tell me more about that project?
Mosse: I met an extraordinary Dutchman
out in Thailand who is known in wreck-chasing circles as the Dakota Hunter.
Once an advertising director for a cigarette company, the Dakota Hunter
ventures into the world's remotest places to salvage the wingtips of C-47
Dakotas, which he then ships back to the Netherlands to be sandblasted and
turned into luxury tables for boardrooms and executive offices. He very
generously tipped me off about a Thai-organized project sinking Dakota aircraft
into the waves off Phuket. These aircraft were vintage American military
bombers (and Sikorsky attack helicopters) from the Vietnam War that had been
donated to the Thai Army upon America's withdrawal from Saigon. They had been
flown by the Thai Air Force until they could fly no longer, and have since lain
rusting in the jungle.
But the
diving clubs of Phuket, struggling to re-stimulate the dive-tourism industry as
well as the coral reef environment that had been virtually wiped out by the
recent tsunami, came up with the idea of sinking these decommissioned aircraft
onto the ocean floor.
I pulled
this footage from Thailand together with a second video showing the 2009 US
Airways crash in the Hudson River. In this piece, I became fascinated by themes
of tourism, disaster, globalization, the military-industrial complex, and
history. But most of all, I'm drawn to the aesthetic power of the air disaster,
and the majesty of watching airplanes be submerged and re-emerge from water,
like a kind of baptismal rite. The sea has a wide array of psychoanalytic and
mythic associations which I feel produce sparks of meaning when they coincide
with the airplane's modern form.
You can
watch an unfinished version of the film below. This was shot and edited by
Trevor Tweeten, with coloring and post-production by Jerome Thelia, and sound
by Martin Clarke. Please note that this piece is not yet finished; it's just an
early draft.
BLDGBLOG: You're not a pilot yourself,
meanwhile, so getting to these sites must have required a tremendous amount of
assistance. Can you tell me a bit more about the people who helped you
visit—like the Dutchman in Thailand—and the process you had to go through to
get to these places?
Mosse: I actually had to abandon one trip
to see a wreck in a high mountain pass because of bear-paw prints in the snow!
On my return trip, I brought a local fellow with a shotgun. I asked him whether
he’d ever had an encounter with a bear, but he wouldn’t tell me, saying that
he’d give me an answer after we reached the wreck and were making our way back
down the mountain. Once I’d finished making the photograph and we’d started for
home, I asked impatiently for an answer. He told a fabulous story of being
charged by a five hundred pound grizzly who picked him up in her jaws and flung
him like a ragdoll. Lucky for him, he managed to fire a shot at the bear while
it was coming at him, saving his life. He showed me the wounds on his shoulder
and forearm.
That trip
was by all-terrain vehicle—with a few hours of heavy walking through snow—but,
on other forays, I’ve hired a helicopter. I had a choice of pilots in a town in
the Yukon, and decided to go with the Swiss pilot, thinking he’d be safer. But
he totally failed to find the wreck and flew me to the top of a mountain range
where we sallied out into the snow to frown at the horizon. I made a second
attempt the same day with a different pilot, one who had lived there all his
life. He took me straight to the wreck and suggested many others. Always shop
local.
Another
pilot dropped me into a swamp, way out in the Yukon wilderness. He left me
there alone and flew off to refuel. I had to wade up to my armpits in the
swampy water for hours, apprehensive that the helicopter would never return.
But my fears were forgotten when I discovered that an animal, perhaps an otter
or a mink, had built a nest out of reeds in the shelter of the belly of the
plane wreck, and birds had propped their nests in holes in the back fin.
BLDGBLOG: What about particularly unexpected
or surreal plane wrecks?
Mosse: The tail of an old Nazi Junkers
was discovered while dredging a lake in northern Finland. I suppose nobody knew
what to do with it, because it was simply dumped in the car park of a
supermarket, in the same sort of place that joyriders might abandon a burned
out car. I like to imagine the local people driving carefully around the old
Nazi tailfin, and it becoming a well-known attraction in the region.
There’s also
a crashed Cold War bomber that has been salvaged from the Icelandic wastes and
is now used as a garden shed. And, in Sicily, the remains of an Alitalia
disaster were propped proudly on the roof of a scrap merchant’s shed. Sadly,
this monument no longer survives.
But
scrappers are not always the plane wreck’s enemy. At 13,000 feet in the
Patagonian Andes, there’s an old Curtiss Commando which has been neatly
cannibalized leaving only the cockpit. In the winter, flamingoes migrate to
this freezing and inhospitable salt lake in northwest Argentina to mate.
BLDGBLOG: When Steve Fossett, the aviator,
disappeared over Nevada last year, there was a huge technological effort to
find his plane again—people using Google Earth from all over the world, for
instance, to spot the wreckage. It became a kind of landscape challenge. Did
the enormous response to that air disaster, or even the public's use of
satellite surveillance technology, have any influence on your project?
Mosse: The hunt for Fossett’s wreck on
Google Earth reminds me of a group of webcam vigilantes who I discovered while
shooting on the Mexican border. These anti-immigration volunteers spend their
free time monitoring footage from live border cameras situated in the Sonoran
Desert or overlooking the banks of the Rio Grande River. I've encountered these
surveillance camera rigs in the middle of absolutely nowhere along the
US-Mexico border. The project, BlueServo Virtual Borderwatch is a
public-private partnership described by Justin Hall as “an innovative real-time
surveillance program designed to empower the public to proactively participate
in fighting border crime.”
I’m
intrigued by the idea of people logging into, and staring at, live webcam views
of an unchanging landscape on their home computers. What drives people to do
this? I suppose it's the same lure that draws people to Google Earth. These are
both a pursuit of the real within—and through—simulacra, and you are apprehending
the world as if it were a computer game. That is enormously empowering, because
the tools at your disposal are extremely powerful. You can go virtually
anywhere without putting yourself at risk.
But,
ultimately, it’s a form of entertainment: you’re consuming a representation of
the world—one that’s been produced—and not representing the world for yourself.
BLDGBLOG: In J.G. Ballard’s fiction, there
is often a character who is a wounded aviator—someone who’s been in a minor
plane crash or car accident, has a ruined knee, and can never fly again. They
are exiled on the earth, so to speak. Ballard sometimes included lost aviators
in his fiction: amateur pilots who have taken on the air of Arthurian knights
flying pioneer missions into the skies of undiscovered worlds. Does this
romance or mythology of the figure of the pilot—not the airplane—have any role
in your interest in photographing crash sites? There's even someone like Amelia
Earhart, whose disappearance only amplified her already global fame.
Mosse: Certainly. Since I was a boy, I’ve
been haunted by Ballard’s story of a journalist visiting the site of an air
disaster in the Mexican mountains. But I’m also thinking along the lines of
Robert Smithson or Bas Jan Ader: the artist heading out to his death in the
wilderness, like the protagonist at the end of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, whose
body disappears into a ghostly fog on a drifting boat.
Image from Fata
Morgana, directed by Werner Herzog.
BLDGBLOG: Finally, is there a crash site
that you really want to get to but either haven’t had the time to visit or the
wreck might even just be a rumor, an urban legend?
Mosse: That would have to be the plane
wreck in Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana. It was like an epiphany for me when
Herzog’s lens comes across this ruin in the Saharan desert; he examines the
twisted form as if it were a sculpture in the landscape, like the Sphinx. I
immediately pressed rewind and watched the scene again and again, swearing to
myself that I would retrace his journey south through Algeria to search for the
ruin. Impossible to find.
BLDG BLOG
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Article: Saddam’s Palaces: An Interview with Richard Mosse
Interview by: Geoff Manaugh
Article: Saddam’s Palaces: An Interview with Richard Mosse
Interview by: Geoff Manaugh
These
extraordinary images—published here for the first time—show the imperial
palaces of Saddam Hussein converted into temporary housing for the U.S
military. Vast, self-indulgent halls of columned marble and extravagant
chandeliers, surrounded by pools, walls, moats, and, beyond that, empty desert,
suddenly look more like college dormitories. Weight sets, flags, partition
walls, sofas, basketball hoops, and even posters of bikini'd women have been
imported to fill Saddam's spatial residuum. The effect is oddly decorative, as
if someone has simply moved in for a long weekend, unpacking an assortment of
mundane possessions.
The effect
is like an ironic form of camouflage, making the perilously foreign seem all
the more familiar and habitable—a kind of military twist on postmodern interior
design.
Of course,
then you notice, in the corner of the image, a stray pair of combat boots or an
abandoned barbecue or a machine gun leaned up against a marble wall partially
shattered by recent bomb damage—amidst the dust of collapsed ceilings and
ruined tiles—and this architecture, and the people who now go to sleep there
every night, suddenly takes on a whole new, tragic narrative.
BLDGBLOG: What was the basic story behind
your visit to Iraq? Was it self-funded or sponsored by a gallery?
Richard
Mosse: The trip
was backed by a Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Performing and Visual Arts,
which I received after graduating from Yale last summer with an MFA in
photography. The Fellowship provides enough to fund two full years of traveling
to make new photographs, and I applied to shoot in a range of places, including
Iraq. My proposal was to make work around the idea of the accidental monument.
I'm interested in the idea that history is something in a constant state of
being written and rewritten—and the way that we write history is often plain to
see in how we affect the world around us, in the inscriptions we make on our
landscape, and in what stays and what goes.
I suppose
it's an idea that captured me while traveling through Kosovo in 2004. I saw a
building by the side of the road there that lay mined and shattered in a field
of flowers. It was almost entirely collapsed—except for a church cupola which
lay at a pendulous angle, though otherwise perfectly intact on a pile of
rubble. It was a marvelously pictorial vision of the Kosovo Albanian desire to
rewrite the history books. In other words, what I saw before me was not an act
of mere vandalism, but a decisive act by the Kosovo Albanian community to
disavow the fact of Serb Orthodox church heritage in the region. The removal of
religious architecture is a terrible crime, and it constitutes an act of ethnic
cleansing (remember Kristallnacht); yet I couldn't help but interpret this as
an attempt to create a brave new Kosovo Albanian world.
I began to
see architecture as something that can reveal the ways in which we alter the
past in order to construct a new future, as a site in which past, present, and
future come together to be reformed. And it's not the only one: language—our
words and the way we use them—are another fine barometer of these things.
But
architecture is something I felt I could research and portray using the dumb
eye of my camera.
BLDGBLOG: Beyond the most obvious
reasons—for instance, there's a war going on—why did you go to Iraq? Was there
something in particular that you were hoping to see?
Mosse: I had heard plenty about Saddam's
palaces. They were the focus of the International Atomic Energy Association's
tedious investigations in the years preceding the invasion, and the news was
always full of delegations being turned away from this or that palace. Why were
we so keen to get inside Saddam's palaces? Because he built so many—81 in
total. Surely, we thought, he must be hiding something in those palace
complexes. Surely he must be building subterranean particle accelerators. And,
in the end, our curiosity got the better of us.
In fact,
Saddam was building palaces in every city as an expression of his authority.
Palace architecture in Iraq served as a constant reminder of Saddam's
immanence. A palace in your city simply fed the sense that Saddam was not just
nearby—he was everywhere. Saddam was omnipresent.
I once heard
a Westerner tell me that, prior to the invasion, Iraqis driving near one of
Saddam's palaces would actually avert their eyes—they would refuse to look
toward the palace. It was almost as if they were prisoners in a great outdoor
version of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. Curiously, the sentry towers along the
perimeter walls of Al-Salam Palace in Baghdad face only outward; they're
screened from looking inward at the palace itself. People say it's so the
guards could not witness Saddam's eldest son Uday's relations with underage
girls, but I rather like to think that it created a sense of the unseen
authoritarian staring blankly outwards. It was like those ominous black turrets
that the British army constructed over the hills of Belfast, packed with
listening devices and telescopic cameras.
But the idea
of Iraqis averting their eyes from Saddam's palace architecture also reminds me
of something from W.G. Sebald's book On the Natural History of Destruction.
BLDGBLOG: That's an incredible book – I
still can't forget his descriptions of tornadoes of fire whirling through
bombed cities and melting asphalt.
Mosse: Sebald recounts how the German
population, after the end of WWII, would ride the trains, staring into their
laps or at the ceiling—anywhere but out the window at the terrible wreckage of
their cities. It was as if they were somehow disavowing the war by willing it
away, by refusing to perceive it.
It's
interesting, then, that, in both instances—in both Iraq and in post-war
Germany—it's the tourist, or the outsider, who observes this blindness. I
suppose that's why I like to make photographs in foreign places: only the
tourist notices the really dumb things that everyone else takes for granted.
BLDGBLOG: The way these structures have been
colonized is often amusing and sometimes shocking—the telephones, desks, and
instant dormitories that turn an imperial palace into what looks like a
suburban office or hospital waiting room. Can you describe some of the spatial
details of these soldiers' lives that most struck you?
Mosse: It was extraordinary how some of
the palace interiors had been transformed to accommodate the soldiers. Troops
scurried beneath vaulted ceilings and glittering faux-crystal chandeliers.
Lofty marble columns towered over rat runs between hastily constructed
chipboard cubicles. Obama's face beamed out of televisions overlooking the
freezers and microwaves of provisional canteen spaces.
Many of the
palaces have already been handed back to the Iraqis—but where Americans troops
do remain, they live in very cramped conditions, pissing into a hole in the
ground and waiting days just to shower. Life is hard on the front line, and it
seems more than a little surreal to be ticking off the days in a dictator's
pleasure dome.
The most
interesting thing about the whole endeavor for me was the very fact that the
U.S. had chosen to occupy Saddam's palaces in the first place. If you're trying
to convince a population that you have liberated them from a terrible dictator,
why would you then sit in his throne? A savvier place to station the garrison
would have been a place free from associations with Saddam, and the terror and
injustices that the occupying forces were convinced they'd done away with.
Instead, they made the mistake of repeating history.
This is why
I've titled this body of work Breach. "Breach" is a military maneuver
in which the walls of a fortification (or palace) are broken through. But
breach also carries the sense of replacement—as in, stepping into the breach.
The U.S. stepped into the breach that it had created, replacing the very thing
that it sought to destroy.
There are
other kinds of breach—such as a breach of faith, a breach of confidence, or the
breach of a whale rising above water for air. All of these senses were
important to me while working on these photographs.
BLDGBLOG: In several of these photos, the
soldiers are literally lifting tiles up from the floor as if the buildings had
been left unfinished, or they're peering through cracks in the palace walls.
From what you could see, were Saddam's palaces badly constructed or were they
just heavily damaged during the war?
Mosse: Tiles simply fell from Al-Faw
Palace because the cement used there had been poorly salinated. If that can
happen to tiles, think what's happening when the entire palace has been built
on similarly salinated foundations! It's just a matter of time before Al-Faw
collapses in on itself. You can already see arches cracking and walls beginning
to sag.
But I'm
reluctant to include images of U.S. soldiers pointing out problems with
Saddam's architecture, because it's fairly evident that those could be a form
of propaganda—and it's easy to forget that many of these palaces were built
during times of terrible sanctions imposed by the West. It might not seem very
clear why Saddam was busy building palaces in a time of sanctions, but remember
how the WPA was set-up during the Great Depression? I don't want to risk being
called an apologist for Saddam, but there are many ways to read a story.
That said,
the palace is a fabulous monument to rushed construction, poor materials, and
gaudy pomp. Saddam had apparently insisted that the palace be finished within
two years, so many shortcuts were taken during construction. For example, the
stairway banisters were made of crystallized gypsum—rather than carved
marble—and where pieces didn't quite fit together, they were just sanded down
rather than replaced. Marble that was used in the palace (such as in the great
spacious bathrooms) was imported from Italy, in spite of the trade embargo. And
the plaster cast frescoes in the ceilings were imported from Morocco.
Al-Faw
Palace later became the U.S, Army's Command HQ, located at the heart of Camp
Victory, near Baghdad International Airport. The palace is now teeming with
generals, including General Odierno, the commander of coalition forces in Iraq.
It's a great, tiered wedding-cake structure, built around an inner hall with
possibly the biggest and ugliest chandelier ever made. In fact, the chandelier
is not made of crystal, but from a lattice of glass and plastic.
The palace
itself is then surrounded by a lake, which seems a bit like a moat—and it would
be tempting to take a swim there, but the moat has been turned into a standing
pool for Camp Victory's sewage. In the summer, the place must be rather
unpleasant: rank in all senses of the word, both military and sanitary. These
artificial lakes surrounding the palace are also populated by the infamous
"Saddam Bass." It's said that Saddam would feed the bodies of his
political opponents to these monsters. In fact, they're not bass at all, but a
breed of asp fish. U.S. troops stationed at Camp Victory love to fish on these
lakes, and a 105-pound specimen was recently caught.
BLDGBLOG: How was your own presence received
by those soldiers? Did you present yourself as a photojournalist or as an art
photographer?
Mosse: The difference between art and
journalism is, for me, of paramount importance—but twenty minutes in Iraq, and
the dialectic recedes. I got a vague sense that Americans working there feel a
little forgotten—unappreciated by people at home—so they're very grateful for a
camera, any camera, coming through. Even a big 8"x10" bellows camera
with an Irishman in a cape. There were a lot of rather obvious photographs that
I chose not to make, and occasionally someone got offended by this.
BLDGBLOG: What was the soldiers' opinion of
these buildings? Did they ever just wander around and explore them, for
instance, or was that a safety violation?
Mosse: I got the feeling that soldiers
who occupied one of Saddam's palaces were pretty interested in its original
function. They seemed a lot more together, and happier with their job, compared
with the troops I met on the massive, sprawling, purpose-built military bases
in the Iraqi desert. Constant reminders of hierarchy and protocol were
everywhere on the bigger bases—but on the more cramped and less comfortable
palace bases, soldiers of different ranks seemed much closer and more capable
of shooting the shit with each other, to borrow an American turn of phrase.
Though a far
tougher environment, there seemed to be real job satisfaction—a sense that they
were taking part in a piece of history.
BLDGBLOG: Architect Jeffrey Inaba once
joked, in an interview with BLDGBLOG, that Saddam's palaces look a bit like
McMansions in the suburbs of New Jersey. He quipped that "the architecture
of state power and the architecture of first world residences don’t seem that
far apart. Saddam’s palaces, while they’re really supposed to be about state
power, look not so different from houses in New Jersey." They're not
intimidating, in other words; they're just tacky. They're kitsch. Now that
you've actually been inside these palaces, though, what do you think of that
comparison?
Mosse: Well, I've never been inside a New
Jersey McMansion, so I can't pass judgment. However, "McMansion" is a
term borrowed by us in Ireland, where I'm from. Ireland was hard-hit by English
penal laws, from the 17th century onward. One of those laws was the Window Tax.
This cruel levy was imposed as a kind of luxury tax, to take money from anyone
who had it; the result was that Irish vernacular architecture became
windowless. The Irish made good mileage on the half-door, for instance, a kind
of door that can be closed halfway down to keep the cattle out but still let
the light in.
Aside from
this innovation, and from subtleties in the method of thatching, Irish
architecture never fully recovered—to the point that, even today, almost
everyone in my country chooses their house from a book called Plan-a-Home,
which you can buy for 15 euros. And if you have extra cash to throw in, you can
flick to the back of the book and choose one of the more spectacular
McMansions. Those are truly Saddam-esque.
BLDGBLOG: Finally, the "Green
Zone," as well as many of these palaces, are notoriously insular, cut-off
behind security walls from the rest of Iraq. Did you actually feel like you
were in Iraq at all—or in some strange architectural world, of walls and
dormitories, surrounded by homesick Americans?
Mosse: Not all of Saddam's palaces are as
isolated from reality as those situated in the green zone (or international
zone, as it's now called). One I visited near Tikrit—Saddam's Birthday
Palace—was even right at the heart of the city. Saddam was said to visit the
palace each year on his birthday.
Wherever you
go on the base, you're eminently shootable—a fantastic sniper target—and can
hear the coming and going of Iraqis in the surrounding neighborhoods. It's a
remarkable experience to go up to the roof with the pigeons at dusk and watch
the changing light. You get a palpable impression of the great tragedy of the
Iraq war, and you can see for yourself the fencing between neighborhoods, the
rubbish strewn everywhere, the emptiness of the place, and you can hear the
packs of dogs baying about. But you can also hear occasional shots fired in the
distance, and you get the distinct feeling that you're being watched.
I spent a
very slow month in Iraq trying to reach as many of these palaces as possible. I
only managed to visit six out of eighty-one palaces. It is impossibly slow
going over there, working within the war machine. These palaces are currently
being handed back to the Iraqis, and many of them will be repurposed, sold to
private developers or demolished. If I could get the interest of a publisher,
for instance, I would return to Iraq to complete the project before Saddam’s
heritage, and the traces of U.S. occupation, are entirely removed.
MYARTSPACE > BLOG
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Article: Art Space Talk: Richard Mosse
Interview by: Brian Sherwin
Article: Art Space Talk: Richard Mosse
Interview by: Brian Sherwin
Richard
Mosse’s photographs and video work often reveal aspects of horror that focus on
the fears of society—the devastation of a plane crash or war torn streets.
However, his work also notes the aesthetic value of these scenarios as objects.
In a sense, his photographs display the reality of these disasters in a manner
that one could describe as commercially voyeuristic. His photographs provide a
safe zone for viewers to explore the chaos of these scenarios. Viewers often
discover an odd sense of beauty in the images due to Mosse's skill as a
photographer and selective process.
Richard
Mosse has exhibited internationally. He has been involved with group exhibits
at the Barbican Art Gallery, Art Chicago, and the Tate Modern. Mosse earned an
MFA in Photography at the Yale School of Art. He also studied art at
Goldsmiths.
 
Brian
Sherwin: Richard,
my understanding is that you originally studied literature and language in
college. You then studied art at Goldsmiths and earned an MFA in Photography
from Yale School of Art in 2008. Can you discuss your academic background and
how it has influenced you as an artist? For example, did you have any
influential instructors?
Richard
Mosse: The BA in
English provided an excellent grounding in literary criticism and turned me
onto various strategies for reading the text. It also made me comfortable with
the notion that every gesture is political, whether or not it is intended to
be.
After the BA
I studied an MRes (Master of Research) in Cultural Studies at the London
Consortium. It was an excellent bridge to making art, and turned the literary
tools from the BA into tools for reading the world. I turned in a dissertation
on memory and photographic representation in the post-war Balkan nations, after
a few months spent traveling and making work in that part of the world.
I suppose
what was happening at this stage was that I was starting to challenge my own
desire to be a photojournalist. I was looking at ways in which contemporary
artists had succeeded in representing pain and suffering where photojournalism
had failed.
BS: How is your youth reflected in the
work you create today? My understanding is that you were born in Ireland in
1980. Did those years and the travels you have had since influence your art?
RM: My video work usually involves an
exchange of some sort with people I can relate to, who are often around my age
and interested in the same sorts of things that I am. Youth is less apparent in
my still photography, but it’s very much there in the sense of someone whose
reading of history (and here I mean current affairs in a state of being written
and rewritten) seeks to violate previous narratives beyond the threshold of
responsibility.
BS: What attracted you to photography
as a means of expressing yourself as compared to other mediums? Can you give
our readers some insight into your practice as a photographer?
RM: The camera often feels too
comfortable in my hands – which is why I prefer the dark cloth and tripod of
large format photography, forcing me to slow down, and hopefully the viewer too.
However, many of the places where I photograph require a speedy capture and a
sharp exit. For this reason, I try my hardest to let the subject speak for
itself. The dumbness of the lens is something that I can’t get over, and is
central in constructing images.
"I am a
camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording
the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her
hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed."--
from Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, 1939
I feel this
dumbness is a fabulous tool for unpacking history, probably because it points
to the visual amnesia of our times. A bit like we’ve stopped reading novels,
we’ve stopped being able to see the still image. We see them but we immediately
forget them. David Levi-Strauss wrote about this in an article published on the
Open Democracy blog (‘Click here to disappear: thoughts on images and
democracy’).
BS: Can you discuss some of your other
influences? For example, have any specific artists influenced your work?
RM: Artists and writers who have left
their trace include Walter Benjamin, Victor Burgin, Phil Collins, Willie
Doherty, Johan Grimonprez, Ori Gersht, Werner Herzog, Marine Hugonnier, Alfredo
Jaar, Emily Jacir, Walid Raad, WG Sebald, Robert Smithson, Jem Southam, Thomas
Struth, Paul Virilio, Jeff Wall.
BS: Tell us more about your Airside
series. My understanding is that the series focuses on understanding how air
disasters shape our cultural imagination and how they can be related to the
fear and myths of flight throughout history. Can you discuss this further?
RM: You can watch a very beautiful
film on Youtube of a controlled air disaster performed by NASA many years ago.
They put different coloured powders in each part of the fuselage. At the point
of impact, each section of the aircraft produces colourful plumes which are
sustained for the few moments it takes for the large plane to be reduced to
virtually nothing and captured from several angles on high-speed cine cameras.
I want the viewer to understand, as I have, that the air disaster is a
profoundly aesthetic object.
Writing
about Gehry in 2001, Hal Foster observed that: "Thirty years ago Guy
Debord defined spectacle as ‘capital accumulated to such a degree that it
becomes an image’. With Gehry and other architects the reverse is now true as
well: spectacle is an image accumulated to such a degree that it becomes
capital."
In
photographing these machines, I wished to elaborate the spectacle of terrorism,
insisting on its existence as image (advertisement), an image built in relation
to capital. To this end, many of the works from Airside are printed very large
and the surface of the face of the photograph is mounted to shiny Plexiglass. I
am fascinated by these provisional structures, and how they speak
unselfconsciously about our ambivalence to terror, their phallic form baldly
revealing our unconscious desire for disaster.
BS: Can you tell us about your video
work? Such as ‘Fraternity’ and ‘Jew on a Ball’ and the social implications of
those projects?
RM: I had been living in America
several months, and was struck over and again at how loud Americans can be. For
example, on the train from New York to New Haven, where I lived to attend the
Yale MFA, there is a conductor on each carriage. The conductors communicate
with each other as well as the driver over the public address system. It
strikes me as extraordinary that the passengers can put up with this banal
running commentary on the journey, sometimes peppered with small talk and bad
jokes. Although I love the quaintness of this form of travel, it rather drove
me mad. And so I made Fraternity. For the Open Studios, I played Fraternity on
the street outside Yale School of Art, and turned the sound up far too loud. A
well dressed man and his good looking family came up and told me this was noise
pollution.
Jew On A
Ball, was made in Lebanon and London during the Israel-Lebanon War of summer
2006. Naked Jewish boys trying to stay on top of a rubber ball – this was
intended as a metaphor for the Jewish homeland: something which the Jew tries
but continually fails to stay on top of, and in failing hurts himself,
sometimes very badly. And of course, the image of a naked Jew echoes Holocaust
imagery, the victim Jew, vulnerable and objectified.
I found the
violence of the footage made by the boys disturbing. Although Arabic terms of
endearment are less objectified than their Western equivalents, I found certain
terms quite dark. For example, it is common to say to your lover, ‘Bury me
alive.’ Presenting physical and metaphysical violence alongside each other, I
wished to reduce an entrenched and tragic political situation down to the level
of a harmful personal relationship, to the point where love and hate are
virtually the same thing. As Bono sang, ‘I can’t live / With or without you.’
BS: You have been involved with a
number of group shows, including group shows at the Tate Modern, Barbican Art
Gallery, and New Insight at Art Chicago. What do you take from group exhibits--
as in the interaction you have with the other artists. Do those experiences
inspire you, so to speak? Perhaps you can discuss one of those shows and how
the experience made an impact on you?
RM: Bloomberg New Contemporaries,
which happens each year in the UK, is a touring group show of between 20-30
selected art school graduates. It’s chosen by a panel of well-known artists
which changes each year. The show tours three different cities in the UK, and
for each there is a big opening and all the artists, as well as the panel, are
flown in for a night of arty parties. It was brilliant, and I am still good
friends with some of the other partcipants in that show. More than ‘Goldsmiths
class of 2005’, I was more comfortable with ‘New Contemporaries class of 2005’.
There was
another superb group show, Belfast’s Ormeau Baths Gallery Perspective Award. It
was a group show of about 20 young artists. They brought in Terry Atkinson and
Ariella Azoulay to select the award winner, and I was very lucky to win it.
BS: Speaking of exhibits, will you be
involved in any upcoming exhibits? Also, where can our readers view your work
in person?
RM: Selected works from Airside will
be shown from Nov 13 to Dec 20 at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York’s Chelsea
district.
BS: Finally, is there anything else
you would like to say about your art or the message you strive to convey to
viewers?
RM: I had some work scheduled for
exhibition in The Aesthetics of Terror, a group show at the Chelsea Art Museum
which was cancelled at the last minute. The museum’s curator, Manon Slome,
resigned and issued a statement saying that ‘the president of the museum
concluded that the show glorified terrorism’ and the show was met by ‘increasing
hostility’ from the museum, which ‘evolved into tactics of blocking, demands
for change, for the elimination of some work.’ This relationship escalated to
the point where the show, if it went ahead, would be highly compromised. Manon
and co-curator Joshua Simon decided, with great courage, to pull the show and
quit. I was amazed that this kind of thing could happen in New York City.
"The
current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in
the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning
of knowledge – unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives
rise to it is untenable." –from ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ by
Walter Benjamin, translated by Harry Zohn, 1940
The Irish Times
August 15, 2008
Article: All artistic eyes on the Marble City
Review by: Aidan Dunne
Article: All artistic eyes on the Marble City
Review by: Aidan Dunne
...The
prevailing mood is wistfully sad, but also constructive and ultimately
affirmative. It's tremendously approachable.
So too is
Richard Mosse's Trainers at the Heritage Council, next to St Canice's
Cathedral. Mosse's photographic and video works juxtapose the real and the
simulated in ways that prompt us to look at our relationship to both. His
large-scale colour photographs document air-disaster simulations at major
airports as well as real disaster sites and scenes of devastation. Killcam is a
video incorporating footage of injured soldiers from the Walter Reed Army
Medical Centre as they engage in combat simulation games, used there for
therapeutic purposes, together with live feed footage of strafing and missile
attacks from Iraq, with comments from military personnel.
Thus
described, it sounds as if the work could be heavy-handed and overbearing. In
fact, the great virtue of Mosse's approach is a certain hands-off quality, as
though he is assembling this material and is himself in a state of perplexity
about it. In other words, he's not devising an argument and then making and
looking for images to substantiate it. He's an observer who is wondering about
the nature of the world we've made, but wondering with concentration and
insight.
Source
Autumn 2008, issue 56
Article: Airside
By: Joanna Bourke
Article: Airside
By: Joanna Bourke
Richard
Mosse’s photographs of dummy aeroplanes used at airports to practice
extinguishing aircraft fires and rescuing passengers are hardly reassuring
either. After the crash landing at Heathrow airport, the Air Accidents
Investigation Branch praised the airline’s crew for effectively carrying out
evacuation drill, but announced that BA038 had leaked some fuel, something
which ‘could have had serious consequences in the event of a fire’. In the
photographs, though, the dummy planes are on fire, but the absence of panicking
passengers and charred bodies signal that these are virtual accidents. The
fire-crew are operating in make-believe worlds, overloaded with sexual
symbolism. In one photograph, the phallic-shaped flying machine sits passively
in front of the ‘Virgin Atlantic’ logo while fire-crew direct a powerful stream
of water at a fire raging in its nether-regions. The once proud flying machine
is already dis-membered.
Gone are the
days when aeroplanes signified the potency of human achievement, the ability of
technology to propel euphoric travellers into other worlds. In the early 1900s,
the splendour of flight induced Sigmund Freud to compare the elongated bodies
of air-machines to the male sex organ. Famously, Freud observed in A General
Introduction to Psycho-Analysis (1910) that the ‘peculiar property’ of the
penis was its ability to ‘raise itself upright in defiance of the law of
gravity’. Such a feat, he wrote, ‘leads to a symbolic representation by means
of balloons, aeroplanes, and just recently, zeppelins’. In dreams, he
continued, the ‘organ of sex’ becomes the essential part of the whole person,
so that the dreamer himself flies’. Today such flights of fancy have come
crashing to the ground. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the
heroic identification of man and machine is no longer compelling. The century’s
great symbol of technological prowess is now regarded simply as a major
contributor to air pollution and, worse, a killing machine wielded by
terrorists and brash governments. In the twenty-first century, all we have left
is the empty elongated nose of the fuselage, our dreams of flight merely conjuring
up fears of annihilation.
NPR, The Bryant Park Project
Article: Nothing to Declare, Photos from the Mexican
Border
By: Ian Chillag
By: Ian Chillag
Traveling
along the Mexico border on a drive from San Diego, photographer Richard Mosse
spotted a rucksack lying by the side of the road. Curiosity got the better of
him, and he looked inside. He found clothes, jewelry and cards for learning
English. description.
Mosse
realized he was looking at the belongings of a woman crossing the border,
likely dropped when she had to run. It was the beginning of his project in
process, "Nothing to Declare," a series of images of artifacts of
journeys across the border.
He's in
Arizona today working on it, but you can find the photographs captured so far
on his website.
BLDG BLOG
Architectural Conjecture, Urban Speculation, Landscape
Futures
February 11, 2008
Article: Air Disaster Simulations
Interview by: Geoff Manaugh, senior editor of Dwell Magazine and blogger behind BLDG BLOG
February 11, 2008
Article: Air Disaster Simulations
Interview by: Geoff Manaugh, senior editor of Dwell Magazine and blogger behind BLDG BLOG
Photographer
Richard Mosse got in touch over the weekend with these photographs of air
disaster simulations: fire crews racing to put out temporary fires, amidst fake
airplane bodies on the runways of airports all over Europe and the United
States.
"I
spotted my first air disaster simulator on the tarmac at JFK," Mosse
wrote. "You can see it yourself next time you fly into that airport. It's
an intimidating black oblong structure situated dangerously close to one of the
runways. Ever since, I have hunted for air trainers while taxi-ing across each
new airport that I've had the chance to fly into."
When I asked
him about the actual photographic process – setting himself up near burning, abstract
airplanes in order to get the right shot – Mosse replied: "They are
extremely difficult to photograph. First the water jets are turned on to douse
the fuselage in water. This is in order to stop the metal warping under the
intense heat of the flames. Then a pilot light comes on – and the spectacle
begins."
"But
before you've had a chance to cock your shutter and take the photo," Mosse
continued, "it is all finished."
The firemen
have put out the fire in seconds. That's their job, after all. They do this
with decisive brevity and great courage, sometimes walking right into flames –
but it doesn't make for an easy photograph. It's all a bit like the sexual act:
the flames come up and men run in and spray everything with a high power water
hose and then it's all over.
But that act
entails artistry and technique...
And each
airport is different: "The fire crew at each airport is always fiercely
proud of their rig," Mosse writes.
One crew
invited their family along and held a barbeque to watch the training unfold
over the course of an evening. Another crew actually let me use their cherry
picker bucket to get my camera into position. At one airport, I was even fully
equipped to let me work as close as possible to the flames. During one shoot, a
Royal Brunei jumbo hit a piece of debris upon take off and the entire crew were
mobilized to battle stations. For security reasons, I hid in a small shed while
they dealt with the emergency, which they resolved without incident. But that's
why these structures are built: to keep the crew fire fit at all times, always
willing to jump into the flames.
It's a kind
of anthropological micro-culture of the air disaster simulation crew, eating
barbecued chicken and running through flames.
Sometimes
mannequins get involved, artificial humans needing to be rescued from
situations of extreme peril. Like Ballardian stand-ins, they are scuffed,
scraped, and partially blackened by oil and smoke, then surgically repaired
with strips of duct tape.
Of course,
this reminds me of the Center for Land Use Interpretation's work on law
enforcement training architecture, where simulated townscapes play host to
staged police raids, fake shoot-outs, and simulated hostage situations. There
is even a Laser Village.
As the
Center writes: "Whether they are made for police or fire departments,
these training sites are stylized versions of ordinary places, with the
extraordinary horrors of the anticipated future applied to them on a routine
basis."
One location
in particular, the Del Valle Training Center, comes complete with
"industrial props (including a portion of an oil refinery), vehicle
accident props (including propane-powered bus collisions and a collapsed
building prop), concrete slab cutting props, shoring training props, confined
space rescue props, and other urban search and rescue facilities."
Something
tells me Richard Mosse would have a field day there.
In any case,
I asked Mosse what the general idea behind this project was, and he explained
that, in all his work, he's been trying to show "the ways in which we
perceive and consume catastrophe."
The actual
disaster is a moment of contingency and confusion. It's all over in
milliseconds. It's hidden in a thick cloud of black smoke and you cannot even
see it. Battles, ambushes, hijackings, air strikes, terrorism: it's the same
with all of these, too. But the catastrophe lives on before the fact and after
the fact, as this spectacle. That's why I wanted to photograph the air disaster
simulators; they are the air disaster more than the thing itself. We have built
in our airports these enormous, absurd, phallic structures with kerosene jets
and water sprinklers. They are monuments to our own fear, made within the pared
down, hyper-functional, green and black and grey symbolic order of militarized space.
Mosse has
also photographed real plane crash sites:
As for the
actual plane crashes, these are also difficult to photograph. You must be
prepared to travel immediately in order to photograph one, and you don't know
if you will even be able to get a photograph of it when you get there. For very
good reasons, press photographers are always corralled into a pen at a great
distance from the disaster. Most photographers take out their longest lens and
zoom right in – but I don't have a zoom lens. I shoot with a wooden field
camera, and so I am forced to shoot the disaster in its context, as a landscape
photograph. The results end up looking like something approaching early war
photography from the 19th century (Roger Fenton, Matthew Brady, Timothy O'Sullivan,
etc.).
"I
think it's important," Mosse concludes, "that we understand where
catastrophe exists in our cultural imagination – where it actually is in
reality – which is why I do what I do."
Be sure to
check out the rest of Mosse's work on his website, including his photographs of
Dubai.
BLDG BLOG
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Article: Saddam’s Palaces: An Interview with Richard Mosse
Interview by: Geoff Manaugh
VisitThese extraordinary images—published here for the first time—show the imperial palaces of Saddam Hussein converted into temporary housing for the U.S military. Vast, self-indulgent halls of columned marble and extravagant chandeliers, surrounded by pools, walls, moats, and, beyond that, empty desert, suddenly look more like college dormitories. Weight sets, flags, partition walls, sofas, basketball hoops, and even posters of bikini'd women have been imported to fill Saddam's spatial residuum. The effect is oddly decorative, as if someone has simply moved in for a long weekend, unpacking an assortment of mundane possessions.
The effect is like an ironic form of camouflage, making the perilously foreign seem all the more familiar and habitable—a kind of military twist on postmodern interior design.
Of course, then you notice, in the corner of the image, a stray pair of combat boots or an abandoned barbecue or a machine gun leaned up against a marble wall partially shattered by recent bomb damage—amidst the dust of collapsed ceilings and ruined tiles—and this architecture, and the people who now go to sleep there every night, suddenly takes on a whole new, tragic narrative.
BLDGBLOG: What was the basic story behind your visit to Iraq? Was it self-funded or sponsored by a gallery?
Richard Mosse: The trip was backed by a Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Performing and Visual Arts, which I received after graduating from Yale last summer with an MFA in photography. The Fellowship provides enough to fund two full years of traveling to make new photographs, and I applied to shoot in a range of places, including Iraq. My proposal was to make work around the idea of the accidental monument. I'm interested in the idea that history is something in a constant state of being written and rewritten—and the way that we write history is often plain to see in how we affect the world around us, in the inscriptions we make on our landscape, and in what stays and what goes.
I suppose it's an idea that captured me while traveling through Kosovo in 2004. I saw a building by the side of the road there that lay mined and shattered in a field of flowers. It was almost entirely collapsed—except for a church cupola which lay at a pendulous angle, though otherwise perfectly intact on a pile of rubble. It was a marvelously pictorial vision of the Kosovo Albanian desire to rewrite the history books. In other words, what I saw before me was not an act of mere vandalism, but a decisive act by the Kosovo Albanian community to disavow the fact of Serb Orthodox church heritage in the region. The removal of religious architecture is a terrible crime, and it constitutes an act of ethnic cleansing (remember Kristallnacht); yet I couldn't help but interpret this as an attempt to create a brave new Kosovo Albanian world.
I began to see architecture as something that can reveal the ways in which we alter the past in order to construct a new future, as a site in which past, present, and future come together to be reformed. And it's not the only one: language—our words and the way we use them—are another fine barometer of these things.
But architecture is something I felt I could research and portray using the dumb eye of my camera.
BLDGBLOG: Beyond the most obvious reasons—for instance, there's a war going on—why did you go to Iraq? Was there something in particular that you were hoping to see?
Mosse: I had heard plenty about Saddam's palaces. They were the focus of the International Atomic Energy Association's tedious investigations in the years preceding the invasion, and the news was always full of delegations being turned away from this or that palace. Why were we so keen to get inside Saddam's palaces? Because he built so many—81 in total. Surely, we thought, he must be hiding something in those palace complexes. Surely he must be building subterranean particle accelerators. And, in the end, our curiosity got the better of us.
In fact, Saddam was building palaces in every city as an expression of his authority. Palace architecture in Iraq served as a constant reminder of Saddam's immanence. A palace in your city simply fed the sense that Saddam was not just nearby—he was everywhere. Saddam was omnipresent.
I once heard a Westerner tell me that, prior to the invasion, Iraqis driving near one of Saddam's palaces would actually avert their eyes—they would refuse to look toward the palace. It was almost as if they were prisoners in a great outdoor version of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. Curiously, the sentry towers along the perimeter walls of Al-Salam Palace in Baghdad face only outward; they're screened from looking inward at the palace itself. People say it's so the guards could not witness Saddam's eldest son Uday's relations with underage girls, but I rather like to think that it created a sense of the unseen authoritarian staring blankly outwards. It was like those ominous black turrets that the British army constructed over the hills of Belfast, packed with listening devices and telescopic cameras.
But the idea of Iraqis averting their eyes from Saddam's palace architecture also reminds me of something from W.G. Sebald's book On the Natural History of Destruction.
BLDGBLOG: That's an incredible book – I still can't forget his descriptions of tornadoes of fire whirling through bombed cities and melting asphalt.
Mosse: Sebald recounts how the German population, after the end of WWII, would ride the trains, staring into their laps or at the ceiling—anywhere but out the window at the terrible wreckage of their cities. It was as if they were somehow disavowing the war by willing it away, by refusing to perceive it.
It's interesting, then, that, in both instances—in both Iraq and in post-war Germany—it's the tourist, or the outsider, who observes this blindness. I suppose that's why I like to make photographs in foreign places: only the tourist notices the really dumb things that everyone else takes for granted.
BLDGBLOG: The way these structures have been colonized is often amusing and sometimes shocking—the telephones, desks, and instant dormitories that turn an imperial palace into what looks like a suburban office or hospital waiting room. Can you describe some of the spatial details of these soldiers' lives that most struck you?
Mosse: It was extraordinary how some of the palace interiors had been transformed to accommodate the soldiers. Troops scurried beneath vaulted ceilings and glittering faux-crystal chandeliers. Lofty marble columns towered over rat runs between hastily constructed chipboard cubicles. Obama's face beamed out of televisions overlooking the freezers and microwaves of provisional canteen spaces.
Many of the palaces have already been handed back to the Iraqis—but where Americans troops do remain, they live in very cramped conditions, pissing into a hole in the ground and waiting days just to shower. Life is hard on the front line, and it seems more than a little surreal to be ticking off the days in a dictator's pleasure dome.
The most interesting thing about the whole endeavor for me was the very fact that the U.S. had chosen to occupy Saddam's palaces in the first place. If you're trying to convince a population that you have liberated them from a terrible dictator, why would you then sit in his throne? A savvier place to station the garrison would have been a place free from associations with Saddam, and the terror and injustices that the occupying forces were convinced they'd done away with. Instead, they made the mistake of repeating history.
This is why I've titled this body of work Breach. "Breach" is a military maneuver in which the walls of a fortification (or palace) are broken through. But breach also carries the sense of replacement—as in, stepping into the breach. The U.S. stepped into the breach that it had created, replacing the very thing that it sought to destroy.
There are other kinds of breach—such as a breach of faith, a breach of confidence, or the breach of a whale rising above water for air. All of these senses were important to me while working on these photographs.
BLDGBLOG: In several of these photos, the soldiers are literally lifting tiles up from the floor as if the buildings had been left unfinished, or they're peering through cracks in the palace walls. From what you could see, were Saddam's palaces badly constructed or were they just heavily damaged during the war?
Mosse: Tiles simply fell from Al-Faw Palace because the cement used there had been poorly salinated. If that can happen to tiles, think what's happening when the entire palace has been built on similarly salinated foundations! It's just a matter of time before Al-Faw collapses in on itself. You can already see arches cracking and walls beginning to sag.
But I'm reluctant to include images of U.S. soldiers pointing out problems with Saddam's architecture, because it's fairly evident that those could be a form of propaganda—and it's easy to forget that many of these palaces were built during times of terrible sanctions imposed by the West. It might not seem very clear why Saddam was busy building palaces in a time of sanctions, but remember how the WPA was set-up during the Great Depression? I don't want to risk being called an apologist for Saddam, but there are many ways to read a story.
That said, the palace is a fabulous monument to rushed construction, poor materials, and gaudy pomp. Saddam had apparently insisted that the palace be finished within two years, so many shortcuts were taken during construction. For example, the stairway banisters were made of crystallized gypsum—rather than carved marble—and where pieces didn't quite fit together, they were just sanded down rather than replaced. Marble that was used in the palace (such as in the great spacious bathrooms) was imported from Italy, in spite of the trade embargo. And the plaster cast frescoes in the ceilings were imported from Morocco.
Al-Faw Palace later became the U.S, Army's Command HQ, located at the heart of Camp Victory, near Baghdad International Airport. The palace is now teeming with generals, including General Odierno, the commander of coalition forces in Iraq. It's a great, tiered wedding-cake structure, built around an inner hall with possibly the biggest and ugliest chandelier ever made. In fact, the chandelier is not made of crystal, but from a lattice of glass and plastic.
The palace itself is then surrounded by a lake, which seems a bit like a moat—and it would be tempting to take a swim there, but the moat has been turned into a standing pool for Camp Victory's sewage. In the summer, the place must be rather unpleasant: rank in all senses of the word, both military and sanitary. These artificial lakes surrounding the palace are also populated by the infamous "Saddam Bass." It's said that Saddam would feed the bodies of his political opponents to these monsters. In fact, they're not bass at all, but a breed of asp fish. U.S. troops stationed at Camp Victory love to fish on these lakes, and a 105-pound specimen was recently caught.
BLDGBLOG: How was your own presence received by those soldiers? Did you present yourself as a photojournalist or as an art photographer?
Mosse: The difference between art and journalism is, for me, of paramount importance—but twenty minutes in Iraq, and the dialectic recedes. I got a vague sense that Americans working there feel a little forgotten—unappreciated by people at home—so they're very grateful for a camera, any camera, coming through. Even a big 8"x10" bellows camera with an Irishman in a cape. There were a lot of rather obvious photographs that I chose not to make, and occasionally someone got offended by this.
BLDGBLOG: What was the soldiers' opinion of these buildings? Did they ever just wander around and explore them, for instance, or was that a safety violation?
Mosse: I got the feeling that soldiers who occupied one of Saddam's palaces were pretty interested in its original function. They seemed a lot more together, and happier with their job, compared with the troops I met on the massive, sprawling, purpose-built military bases in the Iraqi desert. Constant reminders of hierarchy and protocol were everywhere on the bigger bases—but on the more cramped and less comfortable palace bases, soldiers of different ranks seemed much closer and more capable of shooting the shit with each other, to borrow an American turn of phrase.
Though a far tougher environment, there seemed to be real job satisfaction—a sense that they were taking part in a piece of history.
BLDGBLOG: Architect Jeffrey Inaba once joked, in an interview with BLDGBLOG, that Saddam's palaces look a bit like McMansions in the suburbs of New Jersey. He quipped that "the architecture of state power and the architecture of first world residences don’t seem that far apart. Saddam’s palaces, while they’re really supposed to be about state power, look not so different from houses in New Jersey." They're not intimidating, in other words; they're just tacky. They're kitsch. Now that you've actually been inside these palaces, though, what do you think of that comparison?
Mosse: Well, I've never been inside a New Jersey McMansion, so I can't pass judgment. However, "McMansion" is a term borrowed by us in Ireland, where I'm from. Ireland was hard-hit by English penal laws, from the 17th century onward. One of those laws was the Window Tax. This cruel levy was imposed as a kind of luxury tax, to take money from anyone who had it; the result was that Irish vernacular architecture became windowless. The Irish made good mileage on the half-door, for instance, a kind of door that can be closed halfway down to keep the cattle out but still let the light in.
Aside from this innovation, and from subtleties in the method of thatching, Irish architecture never fully recovered—to the point that, even today, almost everyone in my country chooses their house from a book called Plan-a-Home, which you can buy for 15 euros. And if you have extra cash to throw in, you can flick to the back of the book and choose one of the more spectacular McMansions. Those are truly Saddam-esque.
BLDGBLOG: Finally, the "Green Zone," as well as many of these palaces, are notoriously insular, cut-off behind security walls from the rest of Iraq. Did you actually feel like you were in Iraq at all—or in some strange architectural world, of walls and dormitories, surrounded by homesick Americans?
Mosse: Not all of Saddam's palaces are as isolated from reality as those situated in the green zone (or international zone, as it's now called). One I visited near Tikrit—Saddam's Birthday Palace—was even right at the heart of the city. Saddam was said to visit the palace each year on his birthday.
Wherever you go on the base, you're eminently shootable—a fantastic sniper target—and can hear the coming and going of Iraqis in the surrounding neighborhoods. It's a remarkable experience to go up to the roof with the pigeons at dusk and watch the changing light. You get a palpable impression of the great tragedy of the Iraq war, and you can see for yourself the fencing between neighborhoods, the rubbish strewn everywhere, the emptiness of the place, and you can hear the packs of dogs baying about. But you can also hear occasional shots fired in the distance, and you get the distinct feeling that you're being watched.
I spent a very slow month in Iraq trying to reach as many of these palaces as possible. I only managed to visit six out of eighty-one palaces. It is impossibly slow going over there, working within the war machine. These palaces are currently being handed back to the Iraqis, and many of them will be repurposed, sold to private developers or demolished. If I could get the interest of a publisher, for instance, I would return to Iraq to complete the project before Saddam’s heritage, and the traces of U.S. occupation, are entirely removed.
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