The major humanitarian and political issue of our time is migration and with his latest video work, the conceptual documentary photographer Richard Mosse has created a haunting artwork. Projected across three 8 meter wide screens, the film is accompanied by a loud dissonant soundtrack to create an overwhelming, immersive experience. Moving from footage of a live battle inside Syria, in which a US aircraft strikes Daesh positions on the ground, to a scene showing pathologists extracting DNA from the bones of unidentified corpses of refugees drowned off the Aegean island of Leros, the film opens a testimonial space of historical document mediated through an advanced military camera technology. Narratives of the journeys made by refugees and migrants across the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, are captured using an extremely powerful thermographic military camera which perceives body heat at a 50km distance. The camera translates the world into a heat signature of temperature difference, producing a dazzling monochrome halo-image which alludes literally and metaphorically to hypothermia, climate change, weapons targeting, border surveillance, xenophobia, and the life of stateless people. 

The book version recreates the immersive nature of the film, combining still images from the entire sequence over more than 600 pages to represent the harsh and compelling narrative in a full bleed layout.

Incoming was made in collaboration with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten and composer Ben Frost and was co-commissioned by Barbican Gallery and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. The book is published alongside an installation of Mosse’s 3-screen video work in the Curve Gallery of the Barbican Art Gallery.

About the photographer: 

Richard Mosse (born in Kilkenny, Ireland, 1980) holds an MFA in photography from Yale University School of Art. He lives in New York City.

Mosse represented Ireland at the 55th Venice Biennale with The Enclave, for which he was awarded the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize (2014). He is also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Leonore Annenberg Fellowship, the B3 Award from the Frankfurt Biennale, Yale’s Poynter Fellowship in Journalism, an ECAS Commission, a Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting publication grant, the Perspective Award. A body of works related to the video piece and titled 'Heat Maps' has been shortlisted for the 2017 Prix Pictet. Mosse has exhibited widely, including at the Louisiana Museum of Contemporary Art, the Nasher Museum, MCA, MoCP, Montreal Museum of Fine arts, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Portland Art Museum, Kunsthalle Munich, Palazzo Strozzi, Reykjavik Art Museum, Bass Museum, FOAM, Akademie der Künste Berlin, National Gallery of Victoria, and the University of New South Wales.

Published by MACK Books in February 2017

OTA-bound paperback with metallic silkscreen cover image and black painted edges.

Metallic tritone printing throughout.

Texts by Giorgio Agamben and Richard Mosse.

576 pages

280 tritone plates

17.5 cm x 19.7 cm