Richard Mosse

Richard Mosse (b. 1980, Ireland; based in New York) is an artist who seeks to heighten and extend the language of documentary photography to draw attention to overlooked yet urgent stories, working with the aesthetic power of his medium to create highly collaborative, immersive and groundbreaking new forms in photography and the moving image. He often employs special photographic technologies to encode invisible aspects of historically significant subjects within the materiality of his imagery.

Throughout his practice, Mosse has painstakingly documented environmental devastation in remote regions of the Amazon, the mass migration of refugees across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, bitter conflict over rare earth minerals in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the US military’s occupation of Saddam Hussein’s palace complexes in occupied Iraq, illegal immigration along the US-Mexican border, the missing persons crisis in post-war Balkan nations, and other subjects.

Mosse’s immersive video installation, Broken Spectre (2022) describes a complex web of deforestation and environmental crimes unfolding in the Amazon Basin using specialized scientific imaging technologies. Mosse’s 52-minute video artwork, Incoming, (2017), co-commissioned by the Barbican and the National Gallery of Victoria, examines mass migration of asylum seekers from North Africa and the Middle East into Europe, for which he was awarded the Prix Pictet in 2018. Infra (2012) documents armed groups fighting over rare earth minerals in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, for which Mosse received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He won the Deutsche Börse Photographic Award for The Enclave, an immersive 16mm film that was exhibited in the National Pavilion of Ireland at the 55th Venice Biennale.