Richard Mosse - Broken Spectre

‍Broken Spectre, shot over three years, plunges into the heart of the Brazilian Amazon. With this monumental video installation, Mosse shows the devastating impact of deforestation in the Amazonian forest. Playing with different scales and perspectives, the artist offers a striking portrayal of the scope and organisation of the environment's destruction. Switching between aerial views and sequences shot in remote areas of the world's largest tropical forest, Broken Spectre represents an alarm bell that warns of the rainforest's disappearance.

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Richard Mosse (Ireland, 1980) gained recognition for his socially committed documentaires often presented via immersive and monumental installations. He is known for his landscapes in shades of red and pink from the series Infra (2010) depicting the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. More recently, he has focused on migratory flows, which he captures with military thermal imaging cameras (The Castle, 2017, Incoming, 2018).

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Richard Mosse (Ireland, 1980) lives and works in New York. Mosse works at the very limits of documentary photography, appropriating imaging technologies to depict humanitarian and environmental crises in a powerful new light.  

His projects are presented through collaborative, large-scale, immersive multimedia installations with amplified aesthetics.

In past projects, Mosse documented civil war in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (2010 – 2015) using an infrared film intended for military reconnaissance. This produced incongruous images of an overlooked conflict in which the Congo’s lush, green, equatorial vegetation was tinged with pink and purple. Working with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten and composer Ben Frost, his film, The Enclave, represented Ireland at the 55thVenice Biennale in 2013. To create his subsequent film, Incoming (2017), Mosse employed military-grade thermal imaging technology, normally used for long-range border enforcement, to document a tidal wave of refugees landing on the shores of the EU.  

Broken Spectre (2022) is Richard Mosse’s most ambitious work yet. It is accompanied by a catalogue of the same name co-published by Loose Joints, 180 Studios and Converge45.

Richard Mosse has received numerous awards for his work, including the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2014), the Prix Pictet (2017) and, more recently, the Grand Prix S+T+Arts (2023).

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