Mosse, Richard

Irish, b. 1980

BiographyRichard Mosse photographs in the Democratic Republic of Congo with an infrared film stock that was originally designed by the U.S. military as a means to find soldiers in camouflage. While this film simply responds to a different spectrum of light, the visual results are immediately strange and arresting: Mosse’s photographs record the hills with a vivid pink complexion, rather than in the typical shades of green. A complex and brutal conflict continues unabated in the Congo to this day but it leaves very few traces in the landscape itself, which adds an allegorical layer to Mosse’s choice of using of an infrared film stock that was originally produced to see the invisible.

Richard Mosse completed his BA in English Literature and Language from Kings College London (2001) and MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art (2008). Select exhibitions have been held at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (2014), the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark (2015), the Tate Modern, London (2008), and the Futura Center for Contemporary Art, Prague (2010). He was a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2011) and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2014). He lives and works in New York.

--Text adapted from Karsten Lund from the exhibition, Phantoms in the Dirt, at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (July 24 – October 5, 2014)