In Living Colour

Richard Mosse is a multi award-winning Irish conceptual photographer whose work uses hyper-spectral visual effects to explore globalisation, immigration, conflictand human displacement. He is a recipient of the Yale Poynter Fellowship in Journalism, the B3 Award at the Frankfurt Biennial, the Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship.

Beyond Here Lies Nothin', 2011, from the series Infra

Using discontinued infrared film originally designed for military use, in Infra, Mosse depicts eastern Congo's rich topography and how the region's conflict has affected the landscape. The resulting images carry an uneasy romantic resonance, balancing the sublime with a documentary subtext of environmental damage predicated by the armed groups fighting over natural resources in a place of near anarchy and humanitarian disaster.

Yayladagi, Turkey, 2017, from the series Heat Maps

Mosse’s Heat Maps series depicts temporary encampments and border crossings along migration routes to Europe from the Middle East and Africa. Each ‘heat map’ is constructed from hundreds of frames captured using a super-telephoto lens that is part of a military grade thermographic camera. Reading heat as both metaphor and index, these images do not attempt to represent the refugee crisis in a seemingly “transparent” or objective way. Instead, they ask how the notion of “the visible” might be expanded and how, by using a scopic technology against itself, the conditions of visibility might be fundamentally restructured.

Katydid with Nepenthes, 2019, from the series Ultra

In Ultra, Mosse turns to ultraviolet fluorescence to reveal the irreplaceable beauty of the rainforest ecosystem, its symbiotic relationships and interdependency. "The tactile cloud forest mosses, lichens, spiderwebs, bark, corporeal orchid flesh and the dazzling carapces of insects, once illuminated by this unearthly light, became profoundly beautiful. Wander through the forest at night with a UV torch, I was enchanted by an unseen glowing world of natural activity."

Dionaea muscipula with Mantodea , 2019 from the series Ultra All images courtesy of the artist Richard Mosse; carlier | gebauer, Berlin and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York