Idomeni Camp, Greece
Artist: Richard Mosse (Irish, born 1980)
Date: 2016
Dimensions:
40 × 120 in. (101.6 × 304.8 cm)
Frame: 42 1/4 × 122 × 2 in. (107.3 × 309.9 × 5.1 cm)
Medium: Digital c-print on metallic paper (Optium plexi, Duratrans film backed with Dibond)
Classification: Photographs
Credit Line: William J. Hitchcock Fund in memory of Grace J. Hitchcock
Object number: 2017.19
Label Text:Richard Mosse situates his photographic approach between documentary journalism and contemporary art practice. His work fits into a growing body of contemporary photography that documents marginalized peoples in the 21st-century global economy. Mosse focuses on war-torn regions, capturing the effects of conflict on landscapes and people, often in haunting, cinematic images. Idomeni Camp, Greece is part of
his series of panoramic images, titled "Heat Maps," that uses a military-grade heat camera to record human and animal activity. The camera was originally designed as a surveillance tool to identify and track enemy targets, but Mosse re-purposes it to document the displacement of refugees living in camps across Europe.
Constructed from hundreds of frames blended into a single expansive thermal panorama, this image depicts a tableau of small groups of figures rendered as glowing silhouettes. The composite image reduces its subjects into biological traces to call attention to the plight of the stateless refugee who has been denied his/her essential human rights. Mosse explains that he seeks to represent the unrepresentable, to “help us begin to describe, and thereby account for, what exists at the limits of human articulation."
Constructed from hundreds of frames blended into a single expansive thermal panorama, this image depicts a tableau of small groups of figures rendered as glowing silhouettes. The composite image reduces its subjects into biological traces to call attention to the plight of the stateless refugee who has been denied his/her essential human rights. Mosse explains that he seeks to represent the unrepresentable, to “help us begin to describe, and thereby account for, what exists at the limits of human articulation."
Not on view