We carry a generator and gasoline to power a laptop and hard drives. Trevor Tweeten has joined me on this journey to shoot digital infrared. We have repurposed a Red One video camera. Removing the optical low-pass filter from the digital sensor, the camera begins to see infrared light. Next we block the visible spectrum (red, green, blue) by placing an opaque black filter, too thick to see through, over the camera lens. This register of true infrared light gives a peculiar reading, virtually monochrome except for vague traces of an alien topography’s ghostly hue. The jungle and mountain pastures glow a sinister white against darkening skies, as if we can perceive the living soul of things.
Trevor negotiates this place exclusively through the video camera’s LCD viewfinder. He refuses to look up at the scene. “Because the camera is seeing something totally different,” he says, “I can’t trust my eyes. I can guess, but at the same time I’m more dependent on the camera to see and in this way it feels like there’s much more of a barrier between me and the space.”
Our documentation is mediated by unearthly forms that represent an invisible spectrum far removed from known reality. A t-shirt on a rebel soldier reads Barack Obama, but the fabric dye goes undetected in infrared and the camera records only a tattered undecorated garment. General Janvier holds up a piece of paper for the camera with the name of his rebel movement A.P.C.L.S. written clearly in heavy permanent marker. But the lens sees only an unmarked sheet of white paper.
Our project’s inflation of the documentary disorients us into a place of reflexivity and skepticism, into a place in consonance with our intangible, impenetrable, ghost-like subject.
Written April 3, 2011
www.richardmosse.com
Via
An ongoing column by Richard MosseVia [ˈvaɪə]
prep
by way of; by means of; through
[from Latin viā, from via way]
About the Photographer
Richard Mosse (b. 1980, Kilkenny. Lives and works in New York.) Mosse graduated with a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2005 and his MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art in 2008. He has exhibited at venues including Akademie der Künste (Berlin), Barbican Art Gallery (London), Dublin Contemporary, Fotofest Houston, the Kemper and Nelson-Atkins Museums (Kansas City), Kunsthaus Munich, MCA Chicago, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), and Tate Modern (London). Interviews and reviews have appeared in the pages of Aperture Magazine, Art in America, Art Review, Frieze, Modern Painters and Source. Mosse was awarded a Leonore Annenberg Fellowship (2008-10) and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011.
