Richard Mosse

Born in 1980 in Ireland, Richard Mosse lives and works between New York and Berlin. In 2008, he graduated from Yale University where he studied art, specifically photography. He then studied Fine Arts at the University of London and took English Literature courses at Kings College. He is a conceptual documentary photographer but also a filmmaker. He captures conflicts and has therefore traveled to Pakistan, Haiti and the former Yugoslavia. He thus seeks to show the effects of war on the regions it tears, their landscape and population. His reputation and fame are born from his work around the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Mosse sits on the border between documentary journalism and art. His photos aim to offer the viewer a vision of the indefinable and of what the eye cannot imagine in order to "help us begin to describe, and thus to explain, what exists at the limits of the articulation. human ”.

As previously stated, he became known through “Infra” (2010-11), a series of infrared photographs captured in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The latter in striking colors represent both soldiers and civilians, but also the landscapes most often marked by war. As critic Sean O'Hagan writes in The Guardian: "His images of this place often seem to escape the real and the fictional, just ... with their heightened and unreal colors. It's a reportage. of war - but not as we know it ". In fact, to produce these images, he used a large format camera and the Kodak Aerochrome film, a now forgotten film, formerly used for aerial surveys during military reconnaissance. It made it possible to identify camouflaged targets in particular, by recording an infrared light spectrum invisible to the naked eye, making the landscape purplish. It thus offers a new, more poetic and striking vision of war and what it engenders but above all depicts the absurdity of violence.

He has exhibited in New York, Berlin, London and won the pictet prize in 2017.