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EXPOSURES
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teeth into the narrative, and the fact that the narrative
is so complex,” Mosse says. “The complexity itself, this
opacity, was really the subject of my work.”
Mosse’s use of Aerochrome supported this concep-
tual underpinning. Because he had very little idea how
the photographs he made would actually look, the film
served as a constant reminder of “my own inadequacy,
my own blindness,” he says. “In that sense it was a con-
versation with the photographic sublime.”
By hiring local humanitarian workers as guides,
Mosse was able to make his way into rebel enclaves
and photograph the multiple armed groups operating
in Eastern Congo, saying simply that he wanted to tell
their stories. His camera was met by many of his sub-
jects with suspicion, he says, which then often gave
way to posturing. (On one recent trip, which Mosse
made to create a film using a custom infrared stock
Kodak originally produced for an independent movie,
a rebel group refused to be photographed, Mosse says,
because they had just massacred a small village popu-
lation.) Mosse also negotiated his way onto United
Nations plane and helicopter flights, which allowed
him to create aerial landscape photographs.
The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting became aware
of the work because Mosse was staying for a time in
Congo with the daughter of the Center’s executive director, who is a researcher for Human Rights Watch and
was helping Mosse make connections in the field.
The Pulitzer Center has a long history of supporting
journalism in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and
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they felt Mosse’s work, even though he is not a journalist and has worked primarily in a fine-art context,
gave them an opportunity to rekindle interest in the
underreported conflict there. “Finding different ways
to present the topic, to reach a different audience and
then link that back to a larger body of work around the
conflicts in Congo is really important to us, and this
was an interesting way to explore that,” says Nathalie
Applewhite, the Pulitzer Center’s managing director.
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Mosse admits the Pulitzer Center’s support of his
work “could be seen as a little risky on account of
Infra’s leftfield approach to photojournalism, folding
the ethical into esthetics in a new and unusual way.
Infra was never an attempt at advocacy—it was more
concerned with consciousness than conscience—and
so Pulitzer Center’s support came as a wonderful sur-
prise. Yet Infra has actually affected public awareness
of Congo’s war in its own way, giving vivid color to this
forgotten conflict.”
That the Pulitzer Center wanted to support Mosse’s
work as a creative way to engage audiences on the sub-
ject of war in Eastern Congo crystallizes another layer
of meaning in Mosse’s photographs—that photogra-
phy struggles not only to adequately represent the
complexity of war and conflict, but also struggles for
the attention it deserves. At a recent lecture about his
work in Hong Kong, Mosse recalls, a student inter-
rupted him to ask if he thought anyone would think
about his photographs if they weren’t pink. “No, I
don’t,” he replied.
