(calm music)
- Climate change exists outside of human perception.
It's bigger than us.
We can see local expressions of it,
but we can't see the climate changing
and that's really the inherent problem.
It's on a scale beyond what we can perceive.
The rain forest itself spans nine countries.
So as a subject alone,
it's hard to imagine as an object.
(tree falling)
We're really on the tipping point now.
New research suggests that actually the rainforest
is no longer absorbing carbon.
There's so much burning happening,
it's now a net producer of carbon.
But how to tell the story adequately,
I mean we've seen one picture of a burning rainforest,
we've seen them all in a way.
And those pictures are very important,
but you know,
there's so much more to unpack in the Brazilian Amazon.
I'm very interested in trying to find a way to
express extremely, deeply complex things
by looking very carefully at these loaded landscapes,
bigger subjects that the camera can't necessarily see.
My first big project is my first real project,
but I chose the missing persons crisis
in postwar Balkan nations.
A lot of people had not come home
from war and had disappeared.
They were assumed to have been buried in mass graves
which had never been identified.
So the beautiful landscape of Bosnia
and across the Balkans was underwritten by this tragedy.
And so there was an inherent tension within the land itself,
but also an inherent abstraction within the subject matter.
And I was going around trying to photograph something
that you can't put in front of the lens.
And I couldn't see.
The lack of closure of an entire society
to move on from war because of an inability
to mourn the dead.
And I started just looking at the landscape
and documenting
I suppose the absence within the lived environment,
the inscription on the land,
at least emotionally.
But for me it was foundational.
In a way it's something that I keep coming back
to in maybe all my projects.
Kodak had announced the discontinuation
of a specific infrared film called Aerohrome
that was invented in World War II in collaboration
with the US military for camouflage detection.
So infrared light bounces off the chlorophyll
in healthy plants.
Camouflage tends to be made of material,
fabric or paint
and all of those don't have chlorophyll.
If you could image register infrared light
you could instantly pick out the enemy targets
essentially seeing through the camouflage.
In Congo, back then there was at least 50
different arm groups.
I think now there's more than 80
fighting against each other.
So it's a very opaque conflict
and that as a result means it's very overlooked.
I was taking a medium that literally
can make visible what we can't see
and I was smashing it into an unseeness.
That metaphoric leap was very important
and it turned out the more I pushed it
it began to really bare fruit.
It started to be raising awareness
of some of these narratives that I was documenting
and that was remarkable.
But that was the sort of beginning of a new phase
in my practice which I think is kind of continuing
until today of using surveillance technologies
to try to push the limits of the camera,
of the documentary image specifically.
Finishing my project in Congo
I found out about a specific surveillance camera
that can see and perceive heat.
It's proven to image the human body heat
from 30 kilometers distance,
which is a good 19 miles.
The image that it produced was very uncanny and haunting.
The heat within our blood and our veins
is instantly depicted in ways that we can't see
with the human eye,
our breath, our sweat.
(beeping sound)
- Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Just a moment.
- And at that time,
there was this exponential wave of illegal immigration
into the European Union.
Refugees come to claim their human rights of asylum.
This camera itself can be seen as a weapons technology
to detect and to turn them back.
So it was the perfect prism to mediate all
of the complex narratives that I began to document
over a course of several years.
There were a lot of people
and there still are a lot of people,
dying, drowning of exposure to the weather.
And this camera is designed to indexically
reveal human mortality expressed
through cellular combustion.
This is a remarkable instance
of the camera showing us something we can't even see.
Red Cross volunteers rubbing the life giving heat
onto the blankets that have been swaddled
around this dying person.
And you could see the thermal hand print,
the life giving warmth being transferred.
I'm there primarily as a human
and there are instances where we put our things
things down and help when there's no one else.
That's just what humans do.
But in the instances when we continue to film,
when there are other volunteers for example, working,
there's a real sense of belief in what we do,
a sense of faith in the importance of the documentary image
of the evidential image.
Otherwise you wouldn't go to those lengths to carry
those that kind of recording out.
So I made a series of panoramic large scale images,
heat maps of refugee camps.
And I also made a three screen immersive video
called Incoming with sound by Ben Frost
and cinematography by Trevor Tweeten.
So these are the good friends of mine
who I collaborated with also in the Enclave in Congo
and whom I worked with again on my new film, Broken Spectre.
Can we try ultra on this screen?
Photography is at the very heart
of understanding the velocity of deforestation
and I began researching the cameras
in the satellites that produce all the data.
But what really made me more curious was the fact
that the same cameras are being used by agribusiness
and mining to maximize the exploitation of the land.
But I also wanted to change gears
because a lot of the stuff we see in the Amazon
is taken from over, from a high altitude.
What about the stuff we don't see, the non-human?
If you take one square inch of life in the rainforest,
it's just, it's tripping with life.
Just the amount of species is extraordinary.
Scientists use ultraviolet lights to try
and show things about plants.
So I borrow that language
and created these very strange,
almost gothic nocturns.
- Yeah, we can put the big flat bar here.
Let's keep that.
- You can see actually little animals
in there moving around.
We had a lot of technical issues.
- Yeah, we'd spend hours and hours
and then all of a sudden the light would turn off
and then or the camera would shut down.
Actually half the time the camera was overheating.
- The third scale that I chose to examine
was the human scale.
We hold a lot of responsibility
for the processes that unfold in the Amazon.
A lot of the cheap beef directly coming straight
from encroached primary forest and also just our banks.
A lot of that money's predicated
on agribusiness interests in Brazil.
So it's everywhere.
It surrounds us, but how do we implicate the viewer?
This is the real problem and one that we wanted to do.
And our answer was to make a western.
And that's weirdly incongruous
you would think with the rainforest,
but actually everywhere we went in the rainforest
a lot of the processes we were witnessing of deforestation
were being carried out by cowboys.
Cowboy culture actually began centuries ago in Spain
and then it was exported to North America
where it became its own distinct thing.
And when it made its way to Northern Brazil in the Amazon
it became sort of bastardized by the cultural aspirations
of the United States, of manifest destiny
which had already devastated the environment
and the Indigenous communities in the United States,
but is now doing the same in the Amazon,
and it's almost identical in spirit.
The texture of the Spaghetti Western
immediately resonates with the viewer,
with the Western viewer anyway.
And I think that hopefully that will be overly
familiar to us.
This is our culture.
We don't set out,
open the door one morning with a fixed idea
that we have to go and prove.
We try to absorb the narrative in the field in real life
and that's a conversation with the subject
and with the people whom we meet along the way.
- There's nothing that is like actually being
in the field and you just learn so much just
from conversations with people on the ground.
It's just amazing.
- My power, if I have any, is to be able to show you this
what I've seen in a more powerful way than,
I dunno than perhaps the pictures that you've seen
in the newspaper of the same thing.
Or in a new and different way and to make you remember that.