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(calm music)

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- Climate change exists
outside of human perception.

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It's bigger than us.

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We can see local expressions of it,

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but we can't see the climate changing

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and that's really the inherent problem.

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It's on a scale beyond
what we can perceive.

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The rain forest itself
spans nine countries.

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So as a subject alone,

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it's hard to imagine as an object.

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(tree falling)

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We're really on the tipping point now.

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New research suggests that
actually the rainforest

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is no longer absorbing carbon.

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There's so much burning happening,

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it's now a net producer of carbon.

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But how to tell the story adequately,

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I mean we've seen one picture
of a burning rainforest,

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we've seen them all in a way.

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And those pictures are very important,

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but you know,

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there's so much more to unpack
in the Brazilian Amazon.

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I'm very interested in
trying to find a way to

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express extremely, deeply complex things

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by looking very carefully
at these loaded landscapes,

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bigger subjects that the
camera can't necessarily see.

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My first big project is
my first real project,

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but I chose the missing persons crisis

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in postwar Balkan nations.

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A lot of people had not come home

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from war and had disappeared.

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They were assumed to have
been buried in mass graves

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which had never been identified.

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So the beautiful landscape of Bosnia

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and across the Balkans was
underwritten by this tragedy.

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And so there was an inherent
tension within the land itself,

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but also an inherent abstraction
within the subject matter.

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And I was going around trying
to photograph something

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that you can't put in front of the lens.

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And I couldn't see.

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The lack of closure of an entire society

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to move on from war
because of an inability

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to mourn the dead.

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And I started just
looking at the landscape

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and documenting

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I suppose the absence within
the lived environment,

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the inscription on the land,

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at least emotionally.

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But for me it was foundational.

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In a way it's something
that I keep coming back

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to in maybe all my projects.

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Kodak had announced the discontinuation

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of a specific infrared
film called Aerohrome

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that was invented in World
War II in collaboration

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with the US military for
camouflage detection.

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So infrared light bounces
off the chlorophyll

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in healthy plants.

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Camouflage tends to be made of material,

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fabric or paint

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and all of those don't have chlorophyll.

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If you could image register infrared light

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you could instantly pick
out the enemy targets

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essentially seeing through the camouflage.

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In Congo, back then there was at least 50

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different arm groups.

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I think now there's more than 80

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fighting against each other.

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So it's a very opaque conflict

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and that as a result means
it's very overlooked.

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I was taking a medium that literally

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can make visible what we can't see

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and I was smashing it into an unseeness.

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That metaphoric leap was very important

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and it turned out the more I pushed it

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it began to really bare fruit.

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It started to be raising awareness

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of some of these narratives
that I was documenting

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and that was remarkable.

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But that was the sort of
beginning of a new phase

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in my practice which I
think is kind of continuing

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until today of using
surveillance technologies

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to try to push the limits of the camera,

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of the documentary image specifically.

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Finishing my project in Congo

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I found out about a
specific surveillance camera

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that can see and perceive heat.

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It's proven to image the human body heat

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from 30 kilometers distance,

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which is a good 19 miles.

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The image that it produced
was very uncanny and haunting.

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The heat within our blood and our veins

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is instantly depicted in
ways that we can't see

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with the human eye,

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our breath, our sweat.

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(beeping sound)

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- Wait, wait, wait, wait.

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Just a moment.

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Just a moment.

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- And at that time,

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there was this exponential
wave of illegal immigration

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into the European Union.

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Refugees come to claim their
human rights of asylum.

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This camera itself can be
seen as a weapons technology

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to detect and to turn them back.

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So it was the perfect prism to mediate all

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of the complex narratives
that I began to document

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over a course of several years.

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There were a lot of people

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and there still are a lot of people,

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dying, drowning of
exposure to the weather.

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And this camera is designed to indexically

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reveal human mortality expressed

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through cellular combustion.

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This is a remarkable instance

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of the camera showing us
something we can't even see.

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Red Cross volunteers
rubbing the life giving heat

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onto the blankets that have been swaddled

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around this dying person.

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And you could see the thermal hand print,

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the life giving warmth being transferred.

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I'm there primarily as a human

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and there are instances
where we put our things

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things down and help
when there's no one else.

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That's just what humans do.

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But in the instances
when we continue to film,

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when there are other volunteers
for example, working,

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there's a real sense of
belief in what we do,

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a sense of faith in the importance
of the documentary image

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of the evidential image.

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Otherwise you wouldn't go
to those lengths to carry

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those that kind of recording out.

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So I made a series of
panoramic large scale images,

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heat maps of refugee camps.

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And I also made a three
screen immersive video

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called Incoming with sound by Ben Frost

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and cinematography by Trevor Tweeten.

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So these are the good friends of mine

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who I collaborated with
also in the Enclave in Congo

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and whom I worked with again
on my new film, Broken Spectre.

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Can we try ultra on this screen?

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Photography is at the very heart

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of understanding the
velocity of deforestation

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and I began researching the cameras

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in the satellites that
produce all the data.

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But what really made me
more curious was the fact

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that the same cameras are
being used by agribusiness

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and mining to maximize the
exploitation of the land.

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But I also wanted to change gears

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because a lot of the
stuff we see in the Amazon

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is taken from over, from a high altitude.

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What about the stuff we
don't see, the non-human?

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If you take one square inch
of life in the rainforest,

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it's just, it's tripping with life.

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Just the amount of
species is extraordinary.

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Scientists use ultraviolet lights to try

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and show things about plants.

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So I borrow that language

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and created these very strange,

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almost gothic nocturns.

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- Yeah, we can put the big flat bar here.

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Let's keep that.

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- You can see actually little animals

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in there moving around.

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We had a lot of technical issues.

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- Yeah, we'd spend hours and hours

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and then all of a sudden
the light would turn off

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and then or the camera would shut down.

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Actually half the time the
camera was overheating.

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- The third scale that I chose to examine

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was the human scale.

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We hold a lot of responsibility

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for the processes that
unfold in the Amazon.

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A lot of the cheap beef
directly coming straight

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from encroached primary forest
and also just our banks.

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A lot of that money's predicated

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on agribusiness interests in Brazil.

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So it's everywhere.

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It surrounds us, but how
do we implicate the viewer?

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This is the real problem and
one that we wanted to do.

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And our answer was to make a western.

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And that's weirdly incongruous

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you would think with the rainforest,

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but actually everywhere
we went in the rainforest

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a lot of the processes we were
witnessing of deforestation

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were being carried out by cowboys.

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Cowboy culture actually
began centuries ago in Spain

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and then it was exported to North America

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where it became its own distinct thing.

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And when it made its way to
Northern Brazil in the Amazon

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it became sort of bastardized
by the cultural aspirations

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of the United States, of manifest destiny

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which had already
devastated the environment

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and the Indigenous communities
in the United States,

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but is now doing the same in the Amazon,

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and it's almost identical in spirit.

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The texture of the Spaghetti Western

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immediately resonates with the viewer,

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with the Western viewer anyway.

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And I think that hopefully
that will be overly

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familiar to us.

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This is our culture.

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We don't set out,

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open the door one
morning with a fixed idea

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that we have to go and prove.

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We try to absorb the narrative
in the field in real life

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and that's a conversation with the subject

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and with the people whom
we meet along the way.

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- There's nothing that
is like actually being

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in the field and you
just learn so much just

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from conversations with
people on the ground.

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It's just amazing.

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- My power, if I have any, is
to be able to show you this

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what I've seen in a
more powerful way than,

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I dunno than perhaps the
pictures that you've seen

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in the newspaper of the same thing.

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Or in a new and different way
and to make you remember that.