“Elisabeth was stunned, for she believed they were doing the right thing, people had to find out exactly what was going on there, and they needed to see those pictures to “wake up” to reality. Trotta’s only comment was: Oh, so that’s what they need? Is that what they want? The only ones who are awake are the ones who can imagine it without your help.”
In the short story “Three Paths to the Lake” (1972),[1] Ingeborg Bachmann tells the story of Elisabeth Matei, a photojournalist, and her illusory belief that she can find a home, a future, happiness and truth in the world while preserving her integrity. Bachmann shows her protagonist sliding into increasing uncertainty until she loses her purpose in life and her professional identity as a photojournalist and war reporter. This conversation initiates a profound discussion between Elisabeth and her new lover, Franz Josef Eugen Trotta, about her pictures of the Algerian War (waged from 1954 to 1962). Trotta’s response is particularly cutting, for he rejoins: “Do you suppose you have to photograph those devastated villages and corpses so that I can imagine what war is like, or take pictures of children in India so that I know what hunger is? What kind of stupid presumption is that? And someone who doesn’t know would page through your brilliantly successful photo stories for their aesthetic value or the nausea they induce, that should depend on the quality of the pictures, you’re always talking about the importance of quality, isn’t that the reason you’re sent all over the place, because your photographs are good quality?”
Trotta understands Elisabeth’s intentions, her youthful, firmly held beliefs, but over the course of their conversation he increasingly casts doubt about the purpose and ethics of her occupation: “You and your friends won’t end this war like that, it’ll be different, you won’t accomplish anything, I‘ve never been able to understand people who can bear to look at that poor imitation, no, at the most atrocious unreality of all turned into reality, looking at corpses is not the way to stimulate liberal-mindedness.”[2]
Bachmann’s short story uses the literary form to discuss a subject that has concerned photography since the 1970s. At the time it seemed that television, and above all the live broadcast cameras developed at the end of the 1960s, had released still photography from its duty to report. Ever since, many forms of documentary photography—street photography, event photography, photojournalism in general, but above all war and crisis photography—have found themselves the subject of much discussion and criticism. What does documentary photography do, and how does it do it? What can it do? What is it allowed to do? What does it cause? What does it make possible? What does it prevent or destroy? How does the experience of a war zone differ from the journalistic use and design of the visual material it generates, and how is that difference made clear?[3] In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Allan Sekula[4] and Susan Sontag’s[5] texts presented the central challenge to photography; since 2000, philosophers, theorists, and artists like Judith Butler[6] and Hito Steyerl,[7] alongside many authors, have played a leading role in the debates.
Three questions dominate the discussion. The first concerns the working conditions of the war photographer, in particular the concept of “embedded journalism.” If, as has increasingly been the case since the 1980s, journalists and photographers have to be accompanied into and guided through war zones, must be granted access in order to witness the events of war, how can they report objectively and without bias in their written and visual accounts? Critics argue that being embedded in the scene, led and directed by top military staff, clearly and deliberately prevents independent, objective reporting.
The second area of debate concerns the use of these photographs in the media, in newspapers and magazines. The 1970s represent the start of the first media age, in which people began to understand that newspapers and magazines deliberately select the most intense, powerful, touching, shocking images, and that they do this for reasons that go beyond simple altruism or the duty to inform. The reader should be moved, touched, emotionally bound to the publication. Sensationalism sells, and shocking or emotive images are especially effective on the front page and the centerfold.
The third area of debate addresses a higher, more fundamental aspect. Almost all discussions of the genre examine the question of whether documentary photography, in this case war photography, is really capable of interpreting reality and not just of presenting what has been seen, the events, starkly, without comment, exemplarily. Sekula and Sontag argue much more apodictically than Butler and Steyerl on this question. Sekula in particular denies categorically that photography has the ability to present precise, correct, and transparent interpretation. While Sekula and Sontag argue that every frontal side of an image must have its “back side” [MC1] (in other words, the information that is recorded on the real or imagined reverse side of the image—the stamp, the description in the caption, other comments, the conditions of the commission, i.e., the goal, the context of a commission), Butler and Steyerl grant the frontal side its own particular force, an image power or image energy. They argue that a series of images, taken together, can convey certain information and go beyond simply causing visual agitation. Naturally, all these theorists are aware that the documentary act is not simply passive, but actually intervenes in a situation—the event is itself influenced by the very act of photography.
Early Works
Richard Mosse, who began experimenting with photography in 2000 as he worked toward completing several academic degrees,[8] is naturally very familiar with these questions and the difficulties they imply. Like every serious photographer or photography-based artist who chooses to specialize in (social) photo-documentation and has thus rejected a strict conception of the art form, which exclusively presents images in a dense network of information, Mosse has had to regularly engage with these problems from the very start of his career. This is visible even in his earliest works, though perhaps not as clearly and emphatically as in his later, larger, definitive work groups, Infra and Heat Maps.
It can be seen in Nadar Que Declarar, for example, a series of photographs that Mosse took along the illegal crossings on the border between Mexico and the USA in 2007. The series shows clearly that Mosse sweeps the border, as it were, and photographs the detritus, the possessions left behind by the many refugees who have tried to get over the border at that spot. In his series on the Gaza Strip, it is parts of the airport destroyed by the Israeli Defense Forces, the highly symbolic Gaza International Airport (2008); in Kosovo we see a church ripped open by a missile (2004); in The Fall (2009) it is aeroplanes, fallen, but not yet broken or ripped up, which, with the passing of years, seem to meld with the nature into which they have dived; in Nomads (2009) we predominantly look at vehicles that have been thoroughly riddled with bullets, ripped open, shredded, and twisted into strange figures, all through the scattered backlighting effect imparted by a sandstorm.
What is striking about these images is that they are all devoid of people, abandoned, taken after the deed, the event, the catastrophe—the flight, the fall, the missile, the gunshots. Yet they whisper of the people who were active in these scenes. Even the strangely cool, partially fetishized replicas of crashed aeroplanes in the series Airside (2008), the aircraft emergency training simulators, murmur of the 100 to 200 people who also crashed and died in and with the aeroplanes, and they animate our fantasies and trauma now and when flying in the future.
In an interview with WM – Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art Mosse’s response to a simple question—“Why aircrafts?”—opens up a number of insights into his artistic thought: “I feel there’s no finer, more violent, more succinct, more international, and more culturally loaded expression of the catastrophe than the air disaster. However, a plane crash is a very difficult thing to photograph. You can stand under the flight path of JFK with your camera each morning for years and you won’t get anything that resembles an air disaster. Or you can reenact Chris Burden’s piece “747” and stand under the flight path of LAX for ten minutes, fire off a pistol at a jumbo jet, and take a photo of that. The documentary photographer has a terribly difficult life compared with the conceptual artist. But like Prometheus and Loki, we’re both tied to the same rock. Why airplanes? The air disaster holds tremendous traumatic power. An airliner in vertical descent is a spectacle of modernity’s failure. It is horrifying but also aesthetically powerful and depicts unstoppable globalization.”[9]
Only in Breach (2009), the series on the occupation of Saddam Hussein’s palaces in Iraq by American troops—Saddam Hussein had around eighty-five palaces, all situated strategically across the country—do we find people in the pictures. But they are the wrong ones, as it were. Not the native Iraquis, but rather the conquering soldiers who have driven out Saddam and his troops. They move around like stand-ins for us viewers in the partially destroyed architecture, in these contemporary ruins. Almost carefree, for the battle, the deed is done. The central image here is the scene of a group of soldiers on the edge of a half-destroyed swimming pool. The sharp, gleaming geometry of the pool contrasts with a meandering river in the gentle landscape. A group of soldiers have sat down to rest at its edge. One soldier has stretched himself out and removed his helmet, another seems to be commanding him to attention, to no effect. The small-scale frictions of the group contrast with a much large conflict at the intersection of one culture with another, the clash of one power with another, the contrast between the pompous symbolic force of the architecture and the fitness obsession of the American conquerors/liberators. An impressive image, akin to a contemporary “history painting” executed in the medium of photography.
These early series show a world after the climax, after the action. It is not the battle, nor the conflict, the border-crossing, or the height of the events that is shown, but instead the world afterwards, the aftermath of the catastrophe. As a genre it is often termed Aftermath Photography. Mosse here shows us emblematic images, allegories of destruction, of defeat, of energy collapse, of concentration, of the collapse of the “Saddam Hussein” system or the occidental “Modern.” In Airside, on the other hand, the scene of the simulated aeroplane catastrophe changes—through the object itself, but also through the presentation of the site and the photographic execution—into a phallic theater, a surreally designed piece on the subject of victory and defeat.
These early works (some of which were created in an astoundingly short, intense period after Mosse completed his MA at Yale, thanks to the award of a highly remunerated Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in The Performing and Visual Arts) incrementally indicate the direction in which Mosse was preparing to go. In his case, that means being prepared to step into the world, to dare to give a visual report, to expose himself to all the opinions and prejudices that swarm around crisis photography. Specifically, that means placing himself at the interface of social, political, and economic tectonic shifts—whether that is in the Congo, as we will see, in the hell of modern migration on the island of Lesbos, or in the Brazilian rainforest and its endless destructive slash-and-burn land clearances—and remaining there steadfastly, placing his finger on the sore points, making pictures that do not pass by the viewer without effect, but rather draw us in, disturb us, challenge us. Immersive pictures, as they are often described: intense, powerful images that trigger us while they also confront us with a critical situation. In doing so, Mosse plays with spectacle: he employs it in order to grab our attention, he plays with the unique power of the image, with excitement, but at the same time he contextualizes it, bringing the images and videos together into a whole after a great deal of research. He plays with fire, and tries at the same time to tame it, to control it and make it productive.
In 1933 writer Jun’ichito Tanizaki wrote an enchanting book about Japanese aesthetics called “In Praise of Shadows.” In it, Tanizaki compares the aesthetic sensibilities of the European, the Westerner, with those of the Japanese and develops a theory of Japanese aesthetics by examining the dichotomies of darkness and light, of reflection and opacity, of color and simplicity. Its subtitle is “Concept for a Japanese Aesthetics.” Tanizaki compares photographs from Japan with photographs from Europe and America and sets out their differences. Finally, he asks: How would the photographic images of the two cultures differ if the Japanese had invented and developed the photographic camera, if that different mode of thought had flowed into the origins and the development of this tool, this instrument? In reading his words it becomes clear how the two tectonic plates move even further apart in his head, to the benefit of Japanese culture on the one hand, providing a correction to western colonial dominance on the other. His motto is thus: If the tool changes, the thinking changes, and vice versa.[10]
It almost seems as if Mosse, having internalized the many debates surrounding documentary photography, has become attuned to the subtle, gentle, yet precise charm that emanates from this slight book, for he began to employ a new approach and an entirely new photographic perspective for each new project, using new, different film material, and new, different cameras. It allowed him to treat each subject, each situation according to its respective context. He creates his tools anew for each project, for Infra, Heat Maps, Ultra, and Tristes Tropiques. This merits closer examination.
Infra
The Congo could be one of the wealthiest, most influential, and powerful regions of all Africa—and yet it is the complete opposite. Slave traders stole its population, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and even more intensively after the disintegration of the Kingdom of Kongo at the end of the seventeenth century: towards the west, supplying Brazil, in particular, while Muslim slave traders, mainly operating out of Zanzibar, supplied the Arabian countries to the east. After the fall of the Kingdom of Kongo and the collapse of Portuguese hegemony, the area was dominated by the colonial powers of the Netherlands and Britain, before the Belgian King Leopold II ruled parts of the Congo as his own private kingdom for twenty-three years. During the first great rubber boom, he exploited the region’s inhabitants as if they were his private property and had no rights. Such atrocious excesses resulted from this that Leopold was forced to transfer the colony to the Belgian state. In 1960, the Republic of Congo finally gained its independence. However, the country never achieved peace. Its leaders Joseph Kasavubu, Patrice Lumumba, Joseph Mubutu, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, then his son Joseph Kabila successively led the Congo (for a period of time known as Zaire) through three civil wars to its uncertain present.[11]
This vast country—approximately seven times larger than Germany—is rich in natural resources: gold, diamonds, copper, coltan, manganese, lead, zinc, and tin. Yet, the potential associated with this could hardly ever be realized, because rebel groups residing in the Congo since the Rwandan Genocide in 1994 continue to engage in bouts of violence, accounting for more than five million victims according to International Rescue Committee.[12] These include victims of violence and murder, but also a huge number of people who have died as a result of the extremely poor supplies of food and support. [13] The historical record describes a veritable human disaster zone of incalculable magnitude, which has endured over 500 years, its red soil drenched in blood several meters’ depth. As if it were a negatively charged part of the earth, a site of horror that can never divest itself of its karma.
From 2010 to 2011, with Infra and subsequently with The Enclave—the complex six-part video installation on the same theme—Richard Mosse was active in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the North Kivu region, where coltan is the principal mining product—usually mined with bare hands and small tools at great risk to life. Coltan, an ore from which the building material tantalum can be obtained, is of central importance to the global electronics industry (for example, in the production of our smartphones). The “tool” that Mosse selected for this large and dangerous project is a very specific type of film: for the Infra series, he decided to use Kodak Aerochrome, a discontinued reconnaissance infrared film that registers chlorophyll in live vegetation, rendering the lush Congolese rainforest as a beautifully surreal landscape of pinks and reds. In an interview with The British Journal of Photography, Mosse explained: “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… I wanted to confront this military reconnaissance technology, to use it reflexively in order to question the ways in which war photography is constructed.”[14]
Mosse photographed landscapes, scenes with rebels, gatherings out in the open; he portrayed civilians and soldiers, and the mobile dwellings of a population that must constantly be on the move, forever fleeing, in a region afflicted by crisis and war, in which rebels can appear at any moment and disappear just as suddenly back into the jungle, in an endless war waged not with heavy weapons, but principally with machetes and guns. Mosse has created a kind of visual map of a wartime landscape, populated by many actors, perpetrators and victims, in the thick of a jungle growing wild. By using the Kodak Aerochrome film, photochemically recoloring the landscape from a rich green to a pinkish red, Mosse filters reality, projects it into a theatrical, surreal dimension. This alienating effect transforms what is captured on film, making it appear to our eyes an artificial image of reality, a large, complex, fragmented visual story without aim or end, and no promise of an eventual catharsis. It is a tough lesson, with no didactic resolution. An eerie beautiful image of a world, somewhere between photography and art, between document and symbol. Stained into the pink hues of the vegetation. Drenched in the misery of an endless war.
In doing so, he uses Aerochrome, a film stock originally developed in collaboration with the military during the Second World “to subvert camouflage techniques used by the enemy.”[15] Mosse used this obsolete military technology, not in order to track down a phantom enemy, but rather to call attention to the Congo’s uniquely appalling case and its decades-old, even centuries-old, history of crisis. Anyone who sees his work will never forget the Congo again. Besides the aesthetic and sociological experiences and insights it conveys, that is likely the most lasting impact of his work.
Heat Maps
In 2015 and 2017 Mosse explored the phenomenon of mass migration, the great European crisis and its vicious circle of opening then shutting borders, its oscillation between sympathy and rejection, welcome and of repatriation, warm humanity and cold economic rationality. The principle of these works, the theme of which was also realized as an impressive, intense, massive three-part video production under the title "Incoming", shall be demonstrated and analyzed here using a single work, namely the exciting 24-feet-long work "Skaramagas, 2016":
The gaze zooms in. There they stand, lined up in rows, stacked. Hapag-Lloyd, Maerks, Gartner, Cosko, Trans Container AE, Hanjin. Container upon container, side by side, on top of each other. In the foreground, an endless column of trucks, driving up and driving away, delivering and collecting containers without interruption. Small mobile cranes move them here, large harbor cranes load them onto ships. We have to imagine the world’s oceans as gigantic streams of goods flowing back and forth, to and fro. What may cost two euro over here could be valued at 2,000 euro over there, after the journey, and during the time between departure and arrival, bets are placed on the increase or decrease in the value of the goods.
Then our gaze sweeps slowly to the right. The containers are now smaller, arranged in single storeys, with satellite dishes and AC units perched on their roofs, a door and a window or two open out to the front. The global freight depot is now human storage. The containers are laid out geometrically, in the pattern of a village or a town, with main roads and intersecting roads. Laundry is hung out to dry on ropes attached to the containers, a person sits in the entrance to one, a group of people play volleyball in front of another; to the right another group plays football, watched by a few more. Girls stroll round the corner. The sea glitters in the distance. What seems at first glance a large, global free-trade zone is efficiently separated through fencing and rolls of barbed wire. On one side the freely traded goods, on the other the controlled people. Here the greatest possible speed, there the greatest possible deceleration of movement.
The coastal town Skaramagas, a port in the western part of the Athens agglomeration, spreads out before our eyes. It is known for its large dockyard, and also for its refugee camp. My eyes sweep across the extensive length of Mosse’s image, a revelation in black-and-white grandiosity, with deep blacks, bright lights, seductive contrasts that draw the attention. It has an irritatingly physical, forceful, iridescent effect on our perception. Is it a negative print? Has the image been solarized? Mosse operates here, as he has also done in other refugee camps— Tel Sarhoun and Aarsal in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, Nizip I and Nizip II in the Gaziantep province of Turkey, or the camp in Tempelhof Airport in Berlin— not with visible light, but with a so-called thermal imaging camera, which can record heat differences deep in the infrared range. Its general principle is: light is warm, dark is cold. So what we see are not the recorded reflections of light that is visible to us humans, but instead the registration of differences in heat, we see so-called “Heat Maps.” This camera technology has been familiar to the military since the Korean War, but has been continually developed ever since. It can be used to “see” a distance up to 30 km, by day or by night. It provides clear, precise images, full of deep contrasts. On closer inspection, however, we can no longer discern any details, merely abstractions, as if we are looking at finely detailed silhouettes. Each person, each bicycle, each container is clearly recognizable, but only as a type, in its movement, its contours, not as an individual or in its intimacy. It is simultaneously there and not there, it is surveyed and yet can also recede from perception.
Nor can the photographer’s precise location be determined. This camera “shoots” at a great distance, but with a small and narrow scope, almost like the rifle shot of a sniper. Which is why Mosse had to make around 1,500 shots for Skaramagas, which were then stitched together during months of painstaking work to create the panorama, this illusion of an endlessly wide lens. Instead of providing a central perspective, the image takes the complex form of an incremental sweep or scan of the situation.
These cameras are also registered as weapons. In order to increase their range and precision, their sensors are cooled to -50° Celsius. This makes them unsuitable for taking snapshots, as they are cumbersome and difficult to position. A highly stable, robot-controlled tripod executes the shots according to precise settings selected by Mosse and his team—in this case, perhaps twenty five lines of up to 60 exposures shot. Accordingly, only the location is consistent, not the time. Each of the 1,500 exposures entails a time lag, resulting in the possibility for the same person or parts of them to appear two or even several times in the picture.
Thus, Mosse also seeks here to alienate, looking for opportunities to escape the formal language, the formal framing of documentary photography. Here with the paradoxical intervention of a technology and language that are used in real terms for the recognition and surveillance of people, correspondingly also of migrants, but with the simultaneous anonymization of the individual, the person, the identity. Contrary to the intention of the camera (and its inventor), here it is not flesh-and-blood human people who are observed, but rather scenes of political failure, of separation, segragation, marginalization. In the analogue, constructed world these systems succeed for a limited period of time, or so we believe (to the extent that we are willing to accept painful situations such as those in Lesbos), while in the digital world we all become migrants, migrating data.[16]
Ultra
After using the Kodak Aerochrome film in Infra, so that parts of the images appear scarlet red, crimson, and pink; and a thermal imaging camera in the Heat Maps to generate endless black-and-white data fields of migrant detention centers, in Ultra, Mosse creates fascinating images in the rainforest using an ultraviolet lamp and multiple exposures: a magical, radiant ultraviolet glimmer, combining with a silvery green and metallic shimmering shades of cardinal purple and carmine red. In 2018 and 2019 Mosse explored the Brazilian rainforest, narrowing his field of view, ajusting his camera lens from long lens to the macro and micro, and moving his subject from human conflicts to images of nature. Using a UV lamp he scanned the rainforest floor, the lichen, mosses, orchids, flesh-eating plants, and, by shifting the color spectrum, generated in these close-ups an almost incredible, fluorescing, shimmering firework display of color. The UV-fluorescence technique overrides the various camouflage techniques of nature, turning the familiar into the unusual, the fantastical. Mosse’s light-image approach transforms nature into a showpiece that tells the story of proliferation, suppression, devouring, and coexistence, capturing hosts and parasites in nature. Mosse here becomes the light-tamer of the endangered plant world: “At a time when the fragile rainforest is under serious threat from population pressure, burning and deforestation, cattle farms, palm oil plantations, illegal goldmines, and other human-built infrastructure, Mosse investigates the complexity of its biome, its symbiotic relationships and interdependency. The rainforest is a place of constant predation, where the natural world is in a perpetual cycle of kill-or-be-killed. Ultra examines the ways in which plant and insect life have evolved over millions of years for survival, often by developing forms of camouflage, while orchid flowers have evolved to perfectly complement the shape of orchid bees, formalizing the interdependence of the eco-system.”[17]
Tristes Tropiques
Tristes Tropiques is the title of Mosse’s latest series, also shot in the Brazilian rainforest. It bears the subtitle “multispectral orthographic photographs of sites of environmental damage.” While in Ultra Mosse played with the beauty and productivity of the rainforest, in Tristes Tropiques he uses precisely calibrated drone photography to document, map, and survey the various ways in which the rainforest is being destroyed: land clearance, deforestation, cattle farming, palm oil plantations, illegal mines of gold and minerals. In this series, he is not focusing on the problem of the displacement of indigenous peoples, but rather on the huge, extensive, destructive issue of environmental criminality, the vast expanses of rainforest that are being burned down every day. He discovered the multispectral film he employs in the world of highly developed satellite technology. Over time, he intends to establish a kind of archive of this dreadful deforestation.
Mosse is working here in a highly topical, highly charged field. The Iagrapé Institute, a Brazilian “Think and Do Tank” titled one of its strategy papers “Environmental Crime in the Amazon Basin: A Typology for Research, Policy, and Action.” It states: “The Amazon basin is at risk. In Brazil, after nearly a decade of decelerating deforestation during the mid-2000s and early 2010s, the rate of forest clearance and degradation has surged once again. The Brazilian National Institute of Space Studies (INPE) reported an 85 percent increase in deforestation in the Amazon from 2018 to 2019, and by mid-2020, deforestation had already risen a further 34 percent over 2019 levels. Government authorities in countries such as Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela often explain the phenomenon as resulting from individuals and small-scale actors pursuing livelihood strategies. However, extensive research by environmental campaigners has shown that environmental degradation in the region is more often the result of well-organized activities carried out by a wide variety of actors, both legal and illegal at multiple scales.”[18]
With this paper, the Iagrapé Institute launched a “multi-year environmental crime mapping project” that will be overseen by the Institute itself as well as by partners such as Interpol and InSight Crime. It is extremely urgent work—just like Mosse’s powerful visuals. To achieve something in the world, both efforts are necessary—and presumably a whole lot more, too.
Conclusion
Last year Richard Mosse turned 40 years old. It is still kind of early to make definitive statements or formulate firm conclusions about his work. Yet it is fascinating to look at and discuss his development to date. He evidently aims to breathe new life into the genre of documentary photography, break it out of the dead ends in which it finds itself constrained. He retains the principle that the image has its own unique force, but generally dispenses with classic event photography. Instead, he presents the circumstances, the context, the past and future of the scene for the viewer’s inspection. In this sense, he dispenses with what is understood to be the indexical-iconic relationship between a photograph and the event it depicts. After a century of photojournalism, this field has become somewhat tired. As he explains in an interview with Monocle,[19] Mosse feels much more strongly drawn to the forensic, to the visual examination of crime scenes, of facts, of certain subjects, circumstances, problematic situations, such as the slash-and-burn land clearances in Brazil or the migrant crisis in Europe. To do this, he does not use standard, classical cameras to create his series, nor does he employ classic film. Instead, he uses special materials that are not primarily intended for artistic photography, but were instead developed for military and scientific surveillance and analysis. In their joint paper “Seeing like a surveillance agency? Sensor realism as aesthetic critique of visual data governance,” the image theoreticians Rune Saugmann, Frank Möller, and Rasmus Bellmer coined the new term “sensor realism,” which contrasts with the classical, photographic, photojournalistic concept of Realism. They define the new term thus: “By sensor realism, we mean an aesthetic realism based on the visual replication of technologies used in visualising and governing an issue, rather than on a photorealistic depiction of an issue. Sensor realism, thus, is the critical artistic appropriation of visual data production equipment, aesthetics and practices, and allows viewers to scrutinise how visual data production reassembles and formats that which it observes.”[20] But as with the classic photographic camera, so with these new tools the photographer, the camera operator, or the sensor artist has a duty to proceed most carefully vis-à-vis the subject, the conflict, the situation, to engage with and reflect the context of their artistic production. A core aspect of Richard Mosse thinking is allowing the situation’s ambiguities and the tensions inherent within the work to be felt acutely: “I hope to make the viewer feel their own sense of complicity in some of these processes and situations and to do that through a kind of discomfiting effect.”[21] That is what the works of Mosse achieve, with their huge visual force, in a way that photographers rarely succeed in this field. His connection of spectacle with context, with content, with conceptualization, of the concrete with the metaphorical, of looking with thinking and questioning, emphasises the impressive gesture of showing, but never puts on show or denounces.
With eight billion people on the planet and the rapidly growing challenges, problems, conflicts and communication wars that beset us, we probably need to refrain from a leaning back moral superiority, self-assurance, condescension that manifests itself in some of Trotta's statements in Ingeborg Bachmann's story.
[1] Ingeborg Bachmann, “Drei Wege zum See,” in Ingeborg Bachmann: Werke, vol. 2 (Munich: Piper, 1978), 394; trans. Mary F. Gilbert (Ann Harbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), 141.
[2] Ibid.
[3] “Zwischen Zeugenschaft und Voyeurismus – Visuelle Medien und die Berichterstattung über Krieg und Terrorismus als ästhetisches Problem und literarisches Thema” ("Between Witnessing and Voyeurism: Visual Media and the Coverage of War and Terrorism as an Aesthetic Problem and Literary Subject"), in Störungen: Kriegsdiskurse in Literatur und Medien von 1989 bis zum Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts, ed. Carsten Gansel and Heinrich Kaulen (Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010).
[4] Allan Sekula, Photography Against the Grain - Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983 [1984] (London: Mack, 2016).
[5] Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966).
[6] Judith Butler, “Photography, War, Outrage,” PMLA 120, no. 3 (May 2005): 822–27.
[7] Hito Steyerl, Die Farbe der Wahrheit – Dokumentarismen im Kunstfeld (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2008).
[8] 2001 B.A. English Literature at King’s College London; he completed his Master of Research at the London Consortium in Cultural Studies in 2003; he completed a postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2005; finally, he received his Master of Fine Art (MFA) from Yale School of Art in 2008.
[9] Hans Michaud in conversation with Richard Mosse, Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, December 2009: https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/in-conversation-with-richard-mosse/1981
[10] Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker (New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1977), 9. “If this is true even when identical equipment, chemicals and film are used, how much better our own photographic technology might have suited our complexion, our facial features, our climate, our land.”
[11] Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demokratische_Republik_Kongo
[12] International Rescue Committee, Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: An Ongoing Crisis, 2007 accessed 12 April 2015.
[13] And many more like endemic corruption, death threats, human rights violations and abuses, extortion, kidnapping, press ganging children into armed groups, piracy, massacres, sexual violence, mass rape, etc.
[14] British Journal of Photography, November 2010.
[15] Hannah Carroll Harris, “Terrestrial Symbiosis: Richard Mosse’s ‘Ultra’ at Carlier | Gebauer, Berlin Art Link (March 20, 2020).
[16] Rune Saugmann, Frank Möller and Rasmus Bellmer, “Seeing like a surveillance agency? Sensor realism as aesthetic critique of visual data governance,” Information, Communication & Society 23, no. 14 (2020).
[17] CarlierGebauer, press release for the exhibition “Richard Mosse: Ultra,” March 4–April 18, 2020.
[18] Igarape Institute Strategic Paper 47, “Environmental Crime in the Amazon Basin: A Typology for Research, Policy and Action,” August 2020.
[19] Augustin Macellari, interview with Richard Mosse on The Monocle Weekly, January 12, 2021.
[20] Rune Saugmann, Frank Möller & Rasmus Bellmer: Seeing like a surveillance agency? Sensor realism as aesthetic critique of visual data governance. Published 18 June 2020. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1770315
[21] In conversation with Richard Mosse, February 2021