Richard Mosse’s three years of photography work in the Congo using discontinued infrared film is haunting, surreal and beautiful, and it’s currently on display at this year’s Venice Biennial and in a book due out this fall under the work’s title, The Enclave. Mosse is increasingly known for bringing the Cold War-era satellite film, Aerochrome, a new popularity.
The false-color infrared satellite film was initially used for aerial reconnaissance, showing healthy foliage as pink and red and thereby highlighting camouflage as blue or purple. Here, it is the medium for on-the-ground images from war zones of the Congo. As with the film’s properties that switch one color for another on the spectrum, viewers may become unsure of what they are looking at, and where it fits in the cultural spectrum.
Through his lens, a world of sinister machismo is seen in the hues of prom dresses and flowers. Is it an art project or a serious documentary? Either way, the images upend these tidy categories and introduce messy questions about objectivity and aesthetics. In a recent interview for Wired, Mosse discusses how shooting with Aerochrome is like taking care of a baby, his “golden” Irish passport, corruption and the role of the artist.
Wired: After two books, an exhibition, a film and three years working with Aerochrome as your medium, how do you see yourself? Has working in this ambiguous zone of artist/reporter over a period of time made your thinking change?
Richard Mosse: When I return from my journeys the transitions or leaps between worlds are the hardest to reconcile. The return to brash New York restaurants and bars after months watching the turgid equatorial climate unfolding over the dense primeval jungle of eastern Congo — this segue between incommensurable realities is the most challenging aspect of my work, and one that I know I will never fully resolve. At work in the field — lost in an Iraqi dust storm, brokenhearted in a Japanese tsunami, hungover in Haiti, under the gun in Gaza, seduced in Beirut, or turning crimson in Congo — I feel at once deeply lucid yet entirely lost in my imagination; my waking dreams verge into nightmares. Returning to downtown Manhattan seems increasingly less real, and I wonder where home for me is actually located.
W: Is it possible to say if you find yourself to be more of an artist, or a journalist?
RM: Definitely not a journalist. I think that would be slander to the good people of journalism, if anyone tried to describe me as such. Journalists are bound by very strict codes of facticity, the accountant’s truth, while I am accountable only to my imagination, and the world that pushes it into form.
W: Do you have an anecdote or story that highlights the difficulty/impracticality of shooting this project?
RM: Working in eastern Congo with a large wooden camera on a tripod was never going to be simple. You have to walk for days through the jungle to reach certain rebel groups, walking across shifting front lines, and brushing shoulders with suspicious guerrillas along the mucky track. The rain and lightning assault the landscape around you, sweeping through your tent at night. Perhaps the most frustrating, however, was the land’s entrenched corruption, and its greedy officials. Each little village seems to have a mwami (chief), his queen, and a retinue of immigration officials, intelligence officers, and police, who will keep you in a little shed all day, shouting or pushing papers around their desk, until they receive a $20 bill. The national army are the worst, extorting the local civilian population as they process through the jungle to sell their produce on market day. You can see why rebel groups have formed to fight the government. People are so burned out, disillusioned by insidious corruption that has become institutionalized over several generations. They are humiliated, and that humiliation expresses itself in the most horrifying violence, cycles of massacre and systematic sexual violence. Recently, the massacres have been so horrific that unborn babies have been cut from their mother’s belly while entire families are slaughtered by spear.
W: I was struck by the power of many of the portraits in The Enclave. Did you show any of the portraits to the portrait subjects after the fact? What did they think?
RM: I have shown my work to Congolese, and they usually ask me, why is it pink? An excellent question.
W: I’ve read that because of the temperature sensitivity of Aerochrome you had to lug coolers around the tropics–can you give any more insight into the technical aspects of what it was like working in the field?
RM: Yes, this film is critically heat sensitive, lasting a mere seven days at room temperature before expiration. It must be kept in a freezer. I lug around those big ugly beer coolers that plug into cigarette lighters in a car, or can be plugged into a wall socket. Hunting for working freezers in a sub-Saharan war zone has been my task of Sisyphus for the last three years, and I’m looking forward to the day (coming soon) when I run out of this pesky film forever, and no longer need to worry about keeping the film cold. It has been like carrying around one of those Tamagochi toys which you have to keep alive like a feeble baby.
W: Does your identity as an Irishman affect the way that you are able to operate in conflict zones? How so?
RM: The Irish passport is a golden ticket, one welcomed by leftists, guerrillas, and paramilitaries throughout the world.
W: Does it affect your perception of conflict zones in ways you are aware of?
RM: My identity, like so many people’s in the world today, is deeply riven by space and time, nomadism, migration, and homelessness. I am not an Irish nationalist. But my sense of our own conflict in Northern Ireland, and it’s profound complexity, has allowed me to avoid the pitfalls of sentimental idealism when it comes to appreciating conflict situations, and their subtleties.
All images courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery
