Conflict of Interest

The Libya Negs: Tim Hetherington’s Last Images

As Magnum now have representational rights over Tim Hetherington’s archive of images, the work he was making in Libya has surfaced. A selection of 31 images from the 53 rolls of film Hetherington shot on his Mamiya 7II. Below is the text Magnum have provided to explain the work and a few of my favourite images, the only question left is when do we see the other 499 images he shot before his death?

In April of 2011, Tim Hetherington travelled to Libya to photograph the ongoing uprising against the government. His goal was not to photograph the “news” of the day, but rather to focus on the idea of what he described as the “Theater of War” and young men acting out what they must imagine as the Hollywood version of how a rebel soldier looks and acts. He did not use a digital camera like other news photographers on the ground. Instead, he made these pictures with a medium format film camera giving the images much greater detail and clarity. When he was killed on April 20th by a mortar in the city of Misurata, he had photographed some 53 rolls of film. These are the images from those rolls, the last pictures Tim Hetherington would make.

You can see the other images on Magnum’s Website here.

Further reading on Magnum’s acquisition of Hetherington’s archive here.

Richard Mosse’s ‘Infra’ (Collector Edition) Released

“Infra, Richard Mosse’s first book, offers a radical rethinking of how to depict a conflict as complex and intractable as that of the ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mosse photographs both the rich topography, inscribed with the traces of conflicting interests, as well as rebel groups of constantly shifting allegiances at war with the Congolese national army (itself a patchwork of recently integrated warlords and their militias). For centuries, the Congo has repeatedly compelled and defied the Western imagination. Mosse brings to this subject the use of a discontinued aerial surveillance film. Originally developed for military reconnaissance, it registers an invisible spectrum of infrared light, rendering the green landscape in vivid hues of lavender, crimson, and hot pink. The results offer a fevered inflation of the traditional reportage document, underlining the growing tension between art, fiction, and photojournalism. Infra initiates a dialogue with photography that begins as an intoxicating meditation on a broken genre, but ends as a haunting elegy for a vividly beautiful land touched by unspeakable tragedy.”

This collectors edition is limited to a print run of 500, priced at $80 can be bought here.

‘Afghanistan Blueys’ by Tim & Matt Bowditch

‘Tim Bowditch is a photographer, living and working in London. His brother, Matt Bowditch, is a bandsman in the Royal Marines. For his band duties, Matt is based in Exmouth, but in April 2011 he began a three month tour of Afghanistan.
When Matt announced that he was going to Afghanistan, Tim decided that he wanted to collaborate with his brother on a photographic project. For Christmas 2010, Tim gave Matt a Fuji Instant camera, and enough film to last him for his three month tour.
Tim asked Matt to take pictures of anything he liked, the only request was for ‘quiet photos’. The three months of Matt’s tour were marked by three packages (or ‘blueys’, taking their name from the blue paper upon which letter to friends and family are written) of photos, sent back to Tim in England. Tim would choose the images that he liked and the next batch of photos would be shaped by Tim’s selection.’

Tim’s Website / Blog

The Problems of Photographic Representation Talk

‘The relationship between photojournalism and ‘art photography’ is often strained and ambiguous. How do contemporary artists accept or reject the strategies of reportage, and to what effect?’

A talk chaired by Associate Editor for Frieze Christy Lange,  with Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin and Taryn Simons.

1.30pm, Thursday 13th October at the Frieze Art Fair, Regents Park, London.

Points of Conflict: An Artist goes to War. Introducing Richard Mosse

Interview by Aoife Rosenmeyer

Richard Mosse is resting after two hectic years, a whirlwind of work in locations including Iraq, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Congo funded by an Annenberg Fellowship from Yale School of Art; right now he deserves some time off. We rendezvous on a train from Zurich to Lausanne, where we will visit “reGeneration2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today,” an exhibition that includes his work at the Musée de l’Elysée. Mosse is en route from his parents’ home in Kilkenny, Ireland, via Austria, to the raucous folk festival in Serbian Guca, where he hopes to meet some former fighters in the region’s ethnic wars. His most recent series, “Infra,” of photos taken in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has sparked criticism from photojournalists — grist for the mill of an artist who operates at the point where art and journalism meet.

Now a resident of New York, Mosse was born in Dublin in 1980 and moved to London to study English literature before shifting focus from words to images while completing his masters at the London Consortium. After a year at Goldsmiths College, he enrolled at Yale, where he earned an MFA in photography in 2008. He has already had solo shows at such venues as Jack Shainman (who represents his work), in New York; the Fotofest 2010 Biennial, in Houston; and the Eigse Arts Festival, in Ireland. His documentary prints, measuring a monumental six by eight feet, have portrayed plane wrecks, bombed buildings, and models built for airport fire-safety training, while his thoughtful investigative video works probe both the verbal and visual vocabularies of politically fragile locations.

Tall and broad-shouldered, Mosse has the bearing of a man who doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty. For years he has traveled to sites of conflict, drawn by the dense histories that underlie so many disputes. Mosse found compelling situations but was dissatisfied with images produced following photographic tradition. “The camera’s lens is brutally dumb. That dumbness is terribly frustrating,” he says, “but it’s also a fabulous tool for unpacking history.” Mosse agrees with Susan Sontag’s assertion that photojournalism compromises its output to make images audiences can assimilate. In contrast, he is interested in the world as it is, and he makes art, not journalism, trying to access the sublime to convey invisible truths.

In 2009 he went to Iraq, where he was embedded with U.S. troops. The catalyst for the trip was a “New Yorker” article in which Jon Lee Anderson described Saddam Hussein’s palaces, 81 monumental compounds with which Saddam had studded the country to display his might and some of which he never set foot in. They are easily defensible and centrally located, and in 2003 the invading U.S. forces immediately occupied several of them. This struck Mosse as symbolically replacing a despot with an aggressor. “If you’re trying to convince a population that you have liberated them from a terrible dictator,” he says, “why would you then sit on his throne?” Thanks to accreditation from the “Yale Daily News,” he spent a month living with the troops, using any opportunity to document both the colossal structures and the camps that had been set up inside.

Mosse was mindful of Jean Baudrillard’s provocative claim, made in his essay “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” that the first Gulf conflict was actually a scripted media event. From the same events that provided sound bites on international news channels during the second war, he created the 2009 “Breach,” a series of immediate and unexpected images of ornate if crumbling buildings and of soldiers marking time within them. Mosaics, chandeliers, and marble contrast sharply with an alfresco gym and the chipboard-divided accommodations, the internal military posters providing their own version of propaganda. The title could refer to the gap in Saddam’s defenses that the military has filled, the break with tradition, or a breach of faith. The photographs testify that the palaces, so long targets on the radar of the International Atomic Energy Agency, remain a representational minefield.

If Iraq’s media profile is high, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s is low. The turbulence of the past decades — so “immanent,” Mosse says, “it infuses Congo and has done for 50 years” — remains virtually unseen in the West because of its complexity, our lack of interest, and the fact that it’s convenient for us remain ignorant about the dubious source of the metals in our mobile phones. Mosse discovered that in the country itself the war is also, in a sense, invisible, conducted with so-called white weapons, silent arms like machetes and clubs. The rebel Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda live nomadically in the equatorial jungle that covers the country and also swallows the traces of rape, murder, and pillaging. To capture this hidden conflict, Mosse used an unstable and almost defunct photographic medium called color infrared, or false-color film, designed by Kodak in conjunction with the U.S. military, which allows shelters camouflaged in dense forest to be spotted from the air.

The result was “Infra,” produced at the close of his Annenberg marathon last summer. The aesthetic of color infrared has been employed by the likes of the Grateful Dead for album artwork, and some photojournalists accused Mosse of frivolity for using it to create his beautiful but threatening scenes, rendered in powdery pink. But he finds the charge absurd, given the history of the medium.

If the artificial prettiness of color infrared film helps him make the invisible more visible, all the better. Ultimately, he says, “naturalism has no greater claim to veracity than other strategies.”

A Conversation with Richard Mosse

Interview by Joerg Colberg

Jörg Colberg: Let me start off by asking why/how you decided to take photographs of Eastern Congo? How did your interest in the region develop?

Richard Mosse: Congo is regarded as one of the first places in which photography became a powerful humanitarian force. Around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, there was a watershed of concern surrounding the Belgian monarch, King Leopold II’s personal abuse of power in the region. This was simultaneous with the rise of photography within mass media. Two English missionaries, Alice Seeley and John Harris, left for the Congo Free State in 1896 and photographed the brutal human rights violations that they witnessed there. This and other portrayals of the region’s horrors eventually brought an end to Leopold’s claim to Congo. But the misery continued.

Also at work at this time was Joseph Conrad, a steamboat captain along the mighty Congo River in the early 1890s. Conrad wrote a short novel about his experience, Heart of Darkness. […] To this day, Congo seems caught in the wake of Conrad’s steamboat. In the western popular imagination, the place is often regarded as touched by madness, darkness and cannibalism. The conflict’s recent disturbing turn towards gang rape and sexual terror, exacerbated by the United Nation’s ineffective and convoluted bureaucracy, only adds to the region’s reputation as Breughelesque and incomprehensible, echoing Mistah Kurtz’s the horror, the horror.

Wandering through the Menil Collection in Houston I was fascinated by Congolese statues that had been studded with metal nails fashioned in waves. Looking at them, I remembered that the slaves on Conrad’s steamboat had been paid in rivets - a kind of placebo currency invented by the Belgians. Here before me, I realised, were complex and challenging aesthetic forms made from these useless iron slivers. I checked the date and it tallied with Conrad’s visit to the Congo Free State. Here was ‘primitive’ aesthetic virtuosity, exceptional works of art produced in the midst of a humanitarian catastrophe, made by its victims out of the pathetic and worthless tokens paid out by their brutal oppressors. I could wait no longer.

JC: I’m curious about your choice of medium, using Kodak’s Aerochrome infrared film. Essentially, plants start looking pink, and other colours shift as well, resulting in what one could call a bubblegum palette. Is a bubblegum palette a good choice for a rather complicated situation, about which most Westerners know very little?

RM: […] The false-colour Aerochrome was a thing of the past. I was dealing with an abandoned technology which I wanted to use reflexively, to work this military technology against itself in the hopes of revealing something about how photography represents a place like Congo, a place so deeply buried beneath and stifled by its representations.

I was especially interested in how Aerochrome perceives and makes visible an imperceptible part of the light spectrum. In almost all of my work I struggle with the challenge of representing abstract or contingent phenomena that are virtually impossible to see, or at least very difficult to put before a camera lens. This is especially the case in Eastern Congo, where my subject was inherently hidden. From the little I had learned about this conflict, as well as from my past experience working in similar situations, I knew ahead of time that my subject would elude me. Rather like Conrad’s Marlow on the steamer, I was pursuing something essentially ineffable, something so trenchantly real that it verges on the abstract. […] The decision to use colour infrared film forms a dialogue with these specifics. The poetic associations carried by the pink and red palette are a by-product of this conceptual framework, but a very fertile one. It’s an allegorical landscape - La Vie En Rose - steeped in a kind of magical realism.. […]

JC: Of course, there’s also the problem that we live in the Age of Photoshop, and people might just think you simply changed colour using a computer - which, given the growing number of photo-manipulation discussions - might make people focus on the colours and on whether or not what they’re seeing is actually real, instead of the actual subject matter. Were you concerned about this?

RM: Using colour infrared film and making Photoshop manipulations are both creative decisions. There’s nothing more or less truthful about either of them. However, the decision to use analogue infrared film refers to the specificity of that medium, its genesis as a military technology, its potential to reveal the invisible, and a host of other factors. Infra is concerned with that specificity, and a deeper understanding of the work does require the knowledge that these images are the result of a particular kind of film that is sensitive to infrared light.

JC: Given your choice of film it seems you might have a problem with how conflicts in Africa or the continent itself are usually covered. What is your take on this complex?

RM: The idea of a ‘story’ to be ‘covered’ reveals a photojournalist’s task. Journalism is extremely important when it comes to representing conflicts. But it is not the only strategy available. There’s a range of art forms beyond photojournalism. Since they’re not as concretely instrumental as journalism, they give us a whole lot more space to breathe. That’s very important because the world is a complex place.

JC: Can you talk a little more about what you mean when you talk about art forms beyond photojournalism? What role can art play? And needn’t we worry about art being seen as, well, art, in other words something that’s “just made up”?

RM: I feel strongly that something that is ‘just made up’ can speak more powerfully and more clearly than a work of journalism.

At the end of the day, I feel that journalism’s premise is often not simply to inform, but also to affirm our world view. I take issue not with its informing role, but with this affirmation. I believe that it’s imperative to challenge our thinking, particularly in more volatile and loaded landscapes whose narratives are frequently calcified by mass media interests. My work is not intended as a criticism of journalism (which is tremendously important). Rather, it operates within the open field of contemporary art, where the emphasis is not on the answers, but on the questions - not on the facts, but on what they add up to.