A few days later he boarded a plane to eastern Congo. He had tested the film
only once ‘and it looked vaguely OK. Actually it looked pretty bad, but I
went anyway.
There was a certain amount of self–destruction about that first journey. I
wanted to do something that would probably fail.’
Platon, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2012. PHOTO: Richard Mosse
In 2008 the International Rescue Committee estimated the death toll in
war–torn Congo at 5.4 million. ‘But we don’t hear about it, because they’re
dying from a lack of sovereignty and constant displacement, shitty
diseases.’ Four rainy seasons a year make the jungle voracious. The
architecture is built to be abandoned because the front lines are constantly
shifting. News – of massacres and mass rapes – takes days to emerge from the
jungle. ‘By the time photographers arrive there is nothing left to see. It
was this lack of trace that interested me, and ultimately the failure of
documentary photography,’ Mosse said. ‘Conflict is complicated and
unresolvable, and it’s not always easy to find the concrete subject, the
issue, and put it in front of the lens.’
Short of money, he stayed in Catholic missions. He oriented himself by talking
to the handful of correspondents left in Kinshasa but the longer he spent
there, the more people he spoke to, the more rebels he encountered, the more
convoluted his understanding became. There are at least 30 rebel groups in
eastern Congo. ‘Many of them used to have an ideology but they’ve long since
forgotten it. They fall into alliances with each other, then renounce them.’
It took time to find the rebels.
‘You’d take a Land Cruiser as far as you could go, about half a day depending
on rain, and then you’d walk, stay a night, and then walk another day, until
you passed the front line and into the enclave. Once you’re in there, time
changes, as does logic. Some of these rebels believe they’re bulletproof.’
Mosse spent a lot of time by himself. ‘I appreciate the retreat into your
imagination that happens. I love the blank canvas. I spent hours watching
lizards creeping up on clouds of mosquitoes. I brought Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness with me and I read it over and over and over and over. I fixated on
certain paragraphs. Now I can’t touch it.’
On his return ‘I almost didn’t process the film, I was so horrified by my
impending bankruptcy. I was looking for jobs as a dishwasher.’
Kabila Kabanga, 2011. PHOTO: Richard Mosse
But then he happened to look at a picture he had taken of a landscape. ‘I
almost ignored it because it was a pretty picture, then I realised what had
been staring me in the face the whole time. The pink pushed the viewer into
this extraordinary space, way past the threshold of the imagination and into
science fiction, something pulsating, nauseous. We don’t see in pink, but we
don’t see in black and white either – whichever way you look at it,
documentary photography is a constructed way of seeing the world.’
In 2011 he published the work in a book, to considerable acclaim. About the
same time he began to hear rumours of 16mm infrared movie film that still
existed in the depths of a freezer in Hollywood. It took him more than a
year to track it down, but eventually he found himself back in eastern Congo
with the filmmaker Trevor Tweeten. They had 35 reels of film – each reel
lasts about 11 minutes – and an old–fashioned Arriflex SR2 movie camera.
When they returned Mosse couldn’t find anyone to process the film. ‘I went
from lab to lab thinking, I’m ruined, I can’t do anything with this amazing
footage. But at last I found an old–timer in Denver. It took him six months
but finally he cracked it.’
PHOTO: Richard Mosse
The finished piece has a mesmeric quality. Tweeten perfected a floating gaze,
and with its forest of screens, one feels almost lost. Figures pose and
strut for the camera, sometimes they dance. One moment it’s you and a wide
expanse of bush, susurrating quietly, the next, a young girl is singing in
one ear while gunfire erupts in another. It’s physically immersive and
devastatingly beautiful but all the time you are moving forwards towards the
horror at its heart.
Mosse has been back to Congo once since. ‘I went to get closure, to say
goodbye. I’d hired a car, and the driver was so arrogant, he drove off a
bridge. It flipped, fell about 25 feet. We all survived but I had to perform
first aid on the driver in the middle of a cloud of mosquitoes, in the
middle of swamp, in the middle of night, in the middle of nowhere with all
my cameras everywhere, and I thought this is it, I’m finished. I’m finished
with Congo.’
The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize exhibition, the Photographers’
Gallery, London W1, April 11 to June 22 (thephotographersgallery.org.uk).
The Vinyl Factory and Edel Assanti present The Enclave at the Vinyl Factory
Space, Brewer Street Car Park, London W1, April 4–26 (thevinylfactory.com)
Article source: http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/compact-digital-cameras/pentax-x-5-review-50009964/
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