Incoming Humans

Richard Mosse: Incoming
The Curve, Barbican Centre, London
15.02.17 – 23.04.17

My only recollection of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is the Battle of Helm’s Deep. Hordes of half-orcs, in the service of Saruman, are repelled by our Rohirrim heroes. The heads of the half-orcs are shrouded by helmets, the blank expanses of darkness at the bottom of their faces contorted into the semblance of mouths. Their identifying features are those of generic monstrosity – hulking masses of flesh, occasionally grunting or wailing grotesque noise. The half-orcs do not speak – they make sound, not words – and they are not named. Of course, it makes them all the more disposable, as Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli are able to slay them in their droves. And despite the half-orcs continuously perishing, there seems to be an inexhaustible supply of more.

It’s a tactic familiar in cinema, of the named ‘good’ ( ‘us’ ) against the nameless ‘bad’ ( ‘them’ ) in combat scenes, where the life of one of the ‘good’ is worth hundreds of the ‘bad’. And it’s startlingly frequent in political rhetoric as well. We might look back in a similar light on David Cameron referring to ‘a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean’ in July 2015: migrants as inhuman, identified only as a countless mass of creatures and never as individual human beings. And it was this ‘mass’ of people seemingly forming a queue to enter Britain that was also illustrated in the ‘Breaking Point’ poster used by Nigel Farage during the Leave campaign: ‘We must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders’ read the caption beneath.

It seems strange, then, that Richard Mosse had the ambition to, as he says, ‘create an immersive, humanist art form, allowing the viewer to meditate on the profoundly difficult and frequently tragic journeys of refugees’, when he produced the three-channel video Incoming, the centrepiece of his exhibition Incoming at The Curve in the Barbican Centre.¹ Seen only by the heat they emit, the bodies and faces of these people are frequently ghost-like or grotesque: black craters for eyes, a smear of white for a nose – barely human, as they move in a world separate from our own. Even more odd, Mosse recognises that his footage of these individuals through his military-grade thermal camera ‘carries a certain aesthetic violence, dehumanising the subject, portraying people in zombie form as monstrous, stripping the individual from the body’.

The question this poses, then, is a matter of concern: what is the artist to do, aware that he is dehumanising the individuals in the humanitarian crisis he documents? Why, we might wonder, would it be necessary to depict these individuals as even less human than they have already been portrayed, in multiple forms of media, and even by the former Prime Minister? Mosse’s answer is to claim to be questioning that dehumanisation. He explains that ‘what I really hope people will take away, if nothing else, is this sense of uneasy complicity, as Westerners’. Watching the work, however, does not so much generate the feeling of my complicity as recognising Mosse’s complicity in producing the work. Mosse hopes to redirect that sense of unease away from himself and back onto the viewer. I don’t believe we should fall for it. Making a work that propagates and exacerbates a traditional view of the ‘other’ or the ‘sufferer’ as being less human has to very aggressively challenge this mode of consumption if it is validly to justify its claim to critique. Mosse’s gorgeous cinematic spectacle does none of this: it revels in its superficial beauty, and claims ‘critique’ when the viewer senses manipulation.

How has Mosse completed this work despite his own self-confessed conflict over generating a ‘humanist art form’ while simultaneously ‘dehumanising the subject’? The answer seems to lie in the genuine subject of this film: his camera. It all began when a wildlife cinematographer introduced him to this long-range thermal imaging device. It doesn’t begin with the stories of migrants or a humanitarian crisis. It doesn’t begin, and never really touches, in fact, with exposing the stories of humans. Rather, Mosse explains: ‘We began to listen carefully to the camera, to really let it show us what it wanted to do.’ He goes on: ‘Initially, I felt rushed to release the work quickly, before someone else discovered the camera’s potential.’ The reason for his focus is based on the appearance of the footage: ‘In spite of the camera’s coldly brutal function, our initial test shoot revealed a type of imagery that is extremely aesthetic.’ It’s the sort of appearance reminiscent of, for example, the night vision footage used in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty for the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. I can see cinematographers licking their lips at the prospect of adopting it for whatever the next depiction of American military involvement abroad might be. And there’s a good reason for that – because Mosse here has made cinema. It’s three-screen, 7.2 surround sound cinema. He acknowledges that the slowing down of the footage from 60 to 24 frames per second was ‘to give the material a less distracting, more cinematic feel’. It’s quite clearly spectacular, and the result is pure spectacle. And, as Guy Debord first described, spectacle is precisely the substitute for genuine activation or involvement. The viewer is pinned, incapacitated and overwhelmed by spectacle. For it permits a degree of exposure without being genuinely threatened. I am reminded of a quote by Maurice Blanchot: ‘Man, well protected within the four walls of his familial existence, lets the world come to him without peril, certain of being in no way changed by what he sees and hears. “Depoliticization” is linked to this movement.’² It is for this reason that we are happy to act as spectators of this unfolding tragedy, ready to be activated only when it comes knocking on our door, at which point we are more than happy to pull up the drawbridge and banish it, to reject that wandering tribe as a swarm of nameless intruders.

Part of the effect of the manipulative separation we feel is the distance Mosse enforces between himself and the unwitting people he depicts. Because the camera could detect body heat from up to 30.3 kilometres, and because the camera and its associated equipment weighed 80 kilograms altogether, Mosse was a fixed observation post, keeping a close eye on the individuals he was so detached from. Proximity provides names, it permits trust, it permits consent from individuals to be photographed. The predominant named individuals in this work are Richard Mosse ( artist ), Trevor Tweeten ( cinematographer ) and Ben Frost ( composer ). There is a telling moment of rare proximity described by Mosse when a ship carrying three hundred migrants sank off Lesbos on 28 October 2015, killing dozens. Mosse reports: ‘We hung back but Ben Frost, the composer, recorded audio at close range as dying children coughed up blood and rescue workers held them aloft by their heels, slapping their backs in a frantic attempt to clear their lungs.’ This is a self-enforced distance that provides peace for the creators and a proximity that is only ever used to add to the spectacle of the work.

We might compare the direction of this gaze and the distance involved to Trevor Paglen’s Limit Telephotography series where he uses long-range cameras to photograph remote and hidden classified military bases and installations that cannot be seen with the naked eye. Paglen is, at the very least, proposing that in as much as the populace is watched by the state, there is the potential for citizens to return this voyeuristic gaze. By some Foucauldian logic, this might even in some way regulate the state’s behaviour. What is notable about the distance involved between Paglen and his target is that it is enforced by state restrictions, a measure of the state’s control over geographical ‘black sites’, to which they forbid public access. Paglen is forced to see in from afar. Mosse is deliberately staying at arm’s length, because his camera permits it. Paglen is using the technology against those who use it: a reversal of gaze. Mosse claims to be ‘using the technology against itself’, when, in fact, his use of it is for the exact purpose for which it was designed: to monitor nameless masses of people from a distance, exacerbating a traditional version of state-sanctioned observation where those surveilled are controlled.

What is required first and foremost in response to a humanitarian crisis is surely to register it as real, and not as cinema. Perhaps the most worrying question raised by Incoming is why this crisis, already filled with narrative and tragedy, requires an injection of aestheticised spectacle. Are we so desensitised to the real that it must now be flavoured with the spectacular? In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag notes that ‘a catastrophe that is experienced will often seem eerily like its representation’.³ She goes on to explain that ‘It felt like a movie’ is how survivors of catastrophe explain their experience. This is because our exposure to catastrophe is so often spectacularly mediated in cinema that it is difficult to understand in any version of the real. Mosse reports that ‘the camera seemed to simultaneously evoke three modes of storytelling: the mythic, the documentary, and the science fiction’. He has created a fantasy landscape for otherworldly creatures. The challenge we face is surely in enabling the public to see these events as real, and, most importantly, as something to which we can and should react.

1. All quotes by Richard Mosse are from his essay, ‘Transmigration of the Souls’, in Incoming, MACK, London, 2017, unpaginated.

2. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Everyday Speech’, trans. Susan Hanson, Yale French Studies, no. 73, ‘Everyday Life’ ( 1987 ), p. 15.

3. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador, New York, 2003, p. 21.