Contemporary Artists Lecture Series: Richard Mosse

The Fran and Warren Rupp Contemporary Artists Lecture Series

Tags for: Contemporary Artists Lecture Series: Richard Mosse
  • Lecture
Saturday, September 22, 2012, 2:00 p.m.
Vintage Violence, North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo, 2011. Richard Mosse (Irish, b. 1980). Digital C-print; 182.9 x 228.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Vintage Violence, North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo (detail), 2011. Richard Mosse (Irish, b. 1980). Digital C-print; 182.9 x 228.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

About The Event

Photographer Richard Mosse will discuss the breaking and remaking of documentary photography in his series "Infra." This work depicts rebel groups in eastern Congo who are prolonging the civil warfare and violence that dominated the entire country and claimed more than five million lives between 1994 and 2003. The grim content of these portraits and landscapes is both belied and heightened by Mosse's use of an outdated infrared film that shifts the greens of the lush vegetation to candy-sweet pinks, lurid oranges, and vivid reds. The film was developed for the U.S. military in the 1940s and used in aerial surveillance to detect camouflage. In Mosse's images, ironically, it highlights the rebel soldiers.

Born in Ireland and now based in New York, Mosse received an MFA in photography from Yale in 2008 and a Guggenheim Fellowship last year. He comes to Cleveland from Berlin, where he is spending 2012–13 as an artist-in-residence.

Free tickets required.