Richard Mosse
Broken Spectre

[En anglais]

I will not talk about the “terrible beauty” of Richard Mosse’s Broken Spectre (2022), a seventy-four-minute immersive video installation documenting ecocide in the Brazilian Amazon. As anyone familiar with his work knows, Mosse is adept at activating the Romantic sublime through contemporary technology, as he balances visual information on the laser-sharp edge that divides the constituent parts of sublimity: fear and enchantment. In the film, there are potent forms of both. Broken Spectre carries aesthetic vestiges of Mosse’s prior projects, such as the colour palette that blooms and fades from the bubble-gum pink encoding the foliage of the Democratic Republic of Congo in The Enclave (2012–13) and the ghostly pallor of Incoming (2014–17),which measured life force through the body heat of migrants facing extreme environmental conditions. In the present work, the colour spectrum continues to serve a joint indexical aesthetic purpose in depicting relationships among living things, lenses, and light in an attempt to tell the immense story of climate change.

Other constants exist, such as Mosse’s collaboration with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten and composer Ben Frost; his subversion of surveillance technology; and his tackling of large-scale conceptual problems. However, this film surpasses all of Mosse’s previous works in the palpable display of his discomfort with the power dynamic between photographer and subject and his acknowledgment of the former’s contribution to the colonial paradigm at the foundation of the Western landscape tradition, in which perspective and aesthetics have inscribed the signature of empire both pictorially and physically.