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Richard Mosse: Infra

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A detailed account of the press’s resistance to publishing Haeberle’s photographs in Seymour M. Hersch, ‘The Massacre at My Lai’ in John Pilger (ed.), Tell Me No Lies. Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, London: Jonathan Cape, 2004, pp. 85-119. All the mature works of this photographer, born in 1980, are in fact an attempt to demonstrate how the two paths, the one based on the need to document in a morally irreproachable manner and the other on the desire to create sublime works, can actually coincide or at least converge.

In his interview with Art Review, Mosse draws together the sometimes "entwined" history of Ireland and of the Congo, where peacekeeping troops have been sent since the sixties and where, in that same decade, occurred the greatest loss of Irish life. Mosse was still a teenager when the father of his best friend died with a bullet to the head while working with the UN in Congo. See W.J.T Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992 and objections: Lev Manovich, ‘The Paradoxes of Digital Photography,’ Photography After Photography , Hubertus v. Amelunxen, Stefan Iglhaut, Florian, Rötzer (eds), G+B Arts, 1996, pp. 57-65. For simulacrum, cf. Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy’ in T he Logic of Sense, Mark Lester trans., London and New York: Continuum, 2004, pp. 291-320.

Originally created to detect targets for aerial bombing, Kodak Aerochrome film registered a spectrum of light beyond what the human eye can see, rendering foliage in vivid hues of lavender, crimson and hot pink. Infra offers a radical rethinking of how to depict a conflict as complex as that of the ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The images initiate a dialogue with photography that begins as a meditation on a broken documentary genre, but ends as an elegy for a land touched by tragedy. Mosse’s words and his pictorial Pop Art Congo remind us of Joseph Conrad’s subtler creation. Mosse’s touching inadequacy sets up a dialectical tension between ‘the limits of articulation’ and the ethical urge ‘to attempt to describe the unspeakable world’. Like documentary photography, Heart of Darkness also justifies itself as a witnessing, but qualified by claiming its inadequacy. Repeatedly, Mosse’s interviews mention Conrad’s novella, juxtaposing Conrad’s Congo to the post-genocidal country of today:

Vincent, Alice (12 May 2014). "Richard Mosse wins Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2014". The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 13 May 2014. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott, London and New York: Verso, 2009, pp. 83-105; p. 96 Richard Mosse’s work was first introduced to me last year; on hearing that he was to be exhibited at the Open Eye Gallery I was eager to go and experience it first hand. On show is a new body of work made in the Democratic Republic of Congo entitled Infra. Using the recently discontinued Kodak Aerochrome film, his photographs literally put a new light on the turbulent situation in Congo. Designed by the US military to detect camouflage and reveal part of the spectrum of light the human eye cannot see, the film converts infrared light into hues of lavender crimson and hot pink. Mosse’s first solo UK show, Infra runs alongside the archive exhibition by Simon Norfolk, For Most of it I Have No Words.Infra’s most interesting aspect is its referentiality. What I mean by this is the way it draws in knowledge and associations from far beyond the photograph’s literal frame. Its interpretation requires us to return the image to the context of experience, social experience and social memory. In other words, the isolated image is not isolated at all; it belongs. It stands out for its discursive nature, creating its own relational space, as theorised by political geographer David Harvey. Briefly, absolute space is our norm (mapping, Euclidean geometry, urban grids); whereas relative space takes us into referentiality, applicable to text, image or both: a problematic space of non-Euclidean geometries in which the point of view is unstable. Relational space maps out the relationship between the object and the influences bearing upon it. A photograph of Ground Zero or Tienamen Square, for example, evokes other spaces, and the connotations proliferate.17 Berger’s radial model is relational in drawing the mind outwards, regardless of Mosse’s personal views on the matter. In what follows, Berger’s radial serves to identify Infra’s most significant elements. Infra’s strident combination of beauty and suffering is troubling. We need to seek elsewhere what the image suggests, thinking, imagining, even, the kind of space described by Roland Barthes as ‘the great labyrinth’, a spatial metaphor which suggests a journey of interpretation, a quest, a puzzle.6. The labyrinth transcends the frame-outside-the-frame of war photography, by virtue of forming a broader repository of knowledge and reference. Umberto Eco develops a similar analogy referring to ‘the encyclopaedia’ of symbols; always potentially active in our visual field.7. Eco’s encyclopaedia can be adapted as an iconology of remembered or half-forgotten imagery. Photography too has its encyclopaedia; it is no different in this sense from literature or even cinema, and the visual encyclopaedias of both are what art historians resort to for their strategies of interpretation. The advantage of Berger’s radial schema is that it can serve to establish a dynamic use of the encyclopaedia. Berger defines it in this way: ‘A radial system has to be constructed around the photograph so that it may be seen in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday and historic.’8. In more than one sense, Berger is transposing Walter Benjamin’s concept of history as constellation, such that the present can encapsulate the past, its memory.9. If we are faced with the representation of suffering, then the question is how is suffering presented and how does that presentation impact on our responsiveness?14 The limitation of Butler’s framing is its reductive interpretation of conflict imagery as ethical dichotomy of inclusion versus exclusion. Berger asks bigger questions: what is at stake? What other images are so closely related that they cannot be ignored? Pool at Uday’s Palace (2009), one of Mosse’s earlier photographs, lends itself to this mode of analysis: a photograph of a destroyed swimming pool, once belonging to Saddam Hussein’s son; an unremarkable image from an aesthetic point of view, but one which stands out from Mosse’s work for other reasons. No American patriot would have a problem with the photograph. But what is concealed, visually absent, yet present in memory around these ruins of opulence? What does it not say about Iraq, a military intervention which was primarily justified by doctored photos of chemical plants supposedly producing WMDs? Haunting any photograph of Iraq since 2004 is the photographic scoop on Abu Ghraib, thanks to Seymour Hersch, also responsible for the scoop on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.15

The great labyrinth of all the photographs in the world’. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, London: Vintage Classics, 2000, p. 73. Discomfort has long sat at the centre of Mosse’s work, whether aestheticising the conflict in the DRC or anonymising migrants and refugees in his subsequent works, Incoming and Heat Maps, with the use of a thermal imaging camera. For the Same in opposition to Levinasian Other, see Alain Badiou, ‘Return to the Same’ in Ethics. Essay on the Understanding of Evil, London and New York: Verso, 2012, pp. 25-27.The ineffable refers to a philosophical term with roots in Romanticism and the aesthetic of the sublime. Jacques Rancière argues that today’s understanding of the sublime in contemporary art derives from Jean-François Lyotard’s misreading of Kant in The Inhuman (1991), for whom the inability of the faculty of the imagination to picture or fathom what it has been shown gives way to the moral imperative to understand through the higher faculty of reason.34 Hilde Van Gelder, ‘The Theorization of Photography Today: Two Models’ in Elkins, Photography Theory, pp. 299-304. a b c d O'Hagan, Sean (23 August 2012). "Photographer Richard Mosse to represent Ireland at Venice Biennale". The Guardian . Retrieved 14 May 2014. Catherine Opie's new exhibition ‘Walls, Windows and Blood’ is now on view at Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples

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