Richard Mosse
Tuesday, 27 July 2010
Work from Quick.
“…His work from Eastern Congo, a part of the world largely overlooked by mainstream media, is no exception. Mosse used Aerochrome, an obsolete technology, to create an alternative image of the complex social and political dynamics of the country. The film, designed in connection with the United States military during the Cold War, reveals a spectrum of light beyond what the human eye can perceive. He aims “to shock the viewer with this surprising bubblegum palette, and provoke questions about how we tend to see, and don’t see, this conflict.”
Mosse finds inspiration for his work in art and literature, citing Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” as an influence for his journey to Congo. “That novella is full of preposterous and enigmatic images,” Mosse wrote in an e-mail. “And in Houston’s Menil Collection, I saw some Congolese sculptures made with metal rivets, and remembered that the native crew members on Marlow’s steamer were paid with the same useless rivets, a kind of placebo currency invented by the Belgians. Here were those very rivets beaten into extraordinary forms—really excellent art. That’s all it takes, a few strikes to the imagination.” – Whitney Johnson for The New Yorker.