Richard Mosse: What the Camera Cannot See

(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.

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.