Spotlight on Richard Mosse

One of Ireland’s most celebrated visual artists, Richard Mosse’s photography captures the beauty and tragedy in war and destruction. Mosse has represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale and exhibited at The Barbican Centre, Louisiana Museum of Contemporary Art, MCA Chicago, Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Kemper Museum, Palazzo Strozzi, Palais de Tokyo among many others.

Winner of the 2014 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and the 2017 Prix Pictet, one of the most prestigious photography prizes in the world. With the world in turmoil, and the threat of further mass displacements to come, Mosse’s work asks timely, urgent questions about the ways in which the West tends to think, or not think, about refugees.

From The Guardian, on Incoming at the Barbican

“To enter Mosse’s vast triple-screen installation, Incoming, in the Barbican’s Curve gallery, is to be transported to a world both alien and familiar; a spectral place where all that we have seen of the refugee crisis in the media – overcrowded boats, rescue teams, refugee camps, lifeless bodies washed up on tourist beaches, discarded lifejackets – is rendered more visceral but more unreal.

In tonal monochrome, humans appear as ghostly figures, their faces glowing eerily as the camera records traces of sweat, saliva and moisture. The world around them, whether the vast undulating sea or the makeshift streets of the “Jungle” camp in Calais, teeming with displaced humanity, seems Ballardian in its relentlessly grey otherness. It is a world not so much turned upside down as inside out: the dancing flames of a campfire on a mountainside seem almost liquid, the smoke bubbling like water; the moon ripples in the sky like a circle of silk amid fabric clouds; a man douses his head in milk-like water.”

Text by Sean O'Hagan, the Guardian, 2017.

From an interview with The Glass Magazine

When did you first start taking photos?
When I was about ten years old. I was given a simple point and click camera and graduated to the Olympus OM-1, my mother’s old camera, when I was about 14.

What or who were your sources and inspirations at that time?
I grew up in a very artistically-oriented household. My folks would host artists showing at the nearby kunsthalle in Kilkenny city, the Butler Gallery. We had some extraordinary artists passing through and staying with us. Some of the people I remember visiting back in those days are Christian Boltanski, Bill Woodrow, James Turrell, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Richard Long, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Richard Wilson, Andy Goldsworthy, David Nash, Barrie Cooke, and others.

Your parents also trained as artists, didn’t they?
My father is a potter and my mother studied under Hans Haacke [a highly influential German modern artist] at Cooper Union. My grandfather was a sculptor who trained at the Slade, and was a friend of Roland Penrose and Lee Miller, as well as Henry Moore. My uncle is an abstract expressionist painter, although some of his recent paintings have become so big that they have turned into sculptures. My mother turned to gardening and we got an EU grant when I was about six years old to restore our home, which was an old Romantic-era historic garden dating back to the 1790s. That’s where my mother still lives. It was a nice place to grow up. I guess all this took its toll.

What did you learn from this project, in terms of the role of the camera in documenting and recording historic moments?

RM: I learned a great deal about the pain and struggle of so many, the enormous risk they have taken, leaving everything behind, saying goodbye to friends, family, homes, to risk everything, to survive. If the camera is simply a foil or conceit for us to be able to more deeply engage with that, then I suppose what I have learned about – in relation to the camera’s role – has to do with belief. We believed that the camera could reveal something for us, or help us reveal something, and that belief (rather than the camera itself) was what was really at stake.

Interview by Allie Biswas, Glass Magazine Issue 27.