Long form11 March 2026
I didn't know much about Richard Mosse before I walked into MAST that summer. A good friend of mine, Joachim — a photographer and designer whose taste I trust completely — had been insisting I go. "You have to see this," he kept telling me. So I went, not really knowing what I was walking into.
The photographs were beautiful. That was the first thing. These vast landscapes from the eastern Congo, the forests and rivers glowing in deep magentas and crimsons. I just wanted to look at them.
It took a little while before I started understanding why they made me feel slightly uneasy.
Mosse shot the Congo work on Kodak Aerochrome — an old military surveillance film, infrared, originally designed to detect camouflage from the air. It reads the landscape differently than our eyes do. Chlorophyll comes out red and pink instead of green. So the forests of eastern Congo, ancient and dense and the site of one of the deadliest ongoing conflicts in the world, glow in these extraordinary magentas and crimsons. It looks unreal. And you can't stop looking.
That's kind of the whole problem, and I think Mosse knows it. He's talked about beauty being the sharpest tool for making people feel something. Standing there I felt it working on me in real time — this pull toward images of a place where terrible things have happened, made gorgeous by a film stock originally built for war. It's uncomfortable in a way that's hard to name. You feel a little implicated just for enjoying it.
The video installation Incoming was different. Thermal cameras this time, the kind used to track body heat from military aircraft. Refugees crossing the Mediterranean, rendered as white flames against black. The living and the dead look almost the same. I stood in front of it for a long time and didn't really know what to do with myself.
Afterwards I walked up to the Certosa.
I don't know exactly why. It felt like the right thing to do — like I needed somewhere quiet to put everything I'd just taken in. The Certosa di Bologna is a monumental cemetery inside an old Carthusian monastery, arcaded corridors and marble sculpture and light coming in sideways through high windows. One of those places that feels like it's been waiting for you to come and think something through.
What I kept thinking about was the photographs embedded in the tomb plaques. Oval portraits, sepia and faded, faces behind glass. Ordinary people. You look at them and you know almost nothing — a name, some dates, a face. And I found myself thinking about what Mosse was doing with his images, and what the Certosa was doing with these ones, and whether there's a difference. Both are trying to make the dead visible. Both are doing it with a kind of beauty that asks something from you.
I'm not sure I landed anywhere conclusive. That's okay. Some things you sit with.
I stayed longer than I expected. Walking slowly through the arcades, stopping at faces I didn't know. At some point I stopped trying to think it all through and just let it be a nice afternoon in a beautiful place. The light was very good. It was very quiet.
I sent Joachim a message on the way home. Just: you were right.