Richard Mosse wins 2014 Deutsche Börse Prize

Irish Photographer Richard Mosse has been announced as the winner of the 2014 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for his exhibition The Enclave.

First shown as part of the Irish Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, The Enclave consists of documentary photographs taken in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Their uniqueness is born out of colour subversion techniques that saturate the images with luminous pinks.  

The Democratic Republic of Congo is not a country associated with pink – it conjures warfare, child soldiers and poverty in the midst of impenetrable green jungle. Mosse’s gleefully tinted photographs are therefore truly striking, eliciting both discomfort and intrigue with their strange, sad beauty.

Pink leaves, trees, even headpieces abound. The images mimic the surreal and the psychedelic, but their bizarre colouring emphasises the stark reality: amidst the pink jungle stand rebels, soldiers and civilians, all bearing the unmistakable marks of a civil war, which in 2008 was estimated to have cost the lives of 5.4 million people. In an interview with the Telegraph Moss said, “The pink pushed the viewer into this extraordinary space, way past the threshold of the imagination and into science fiction, something pulsating, nauseous.” The pink commands us to pay attention, it displaces us from the all too familiar visions of war that have become so unremarkable in their ubiquity. It forces us to consider conflict again in a new shade. 

The pink comes from the type of film Mosse uses, Aerochrome, which was invented during WWII and registers the infrared light transmitted by healthy plants in vibrant pinks and reds. Mosse, in an interview to Popular Photography, said that he “wanted to use it as a way of thinking through this conflict and the rules and conventions of war photography.” Mosse has also photographed in Iraq and Gaza before the Congo. Though he mainly photographs in war zones, he is more artist than documentary photographer, employing his photographs to communicate ideas rather than events.

The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize has been around since 1996 and has become one of the largest, and most respected, photography prizes in the UK with a £30,000 reward to match. Previous winners include Andreas Gursky, Boris Mikhailov and Juergen Teller. The other nominees for the 2014 prize consist of: Alberto García-Alix, for his presentation of self-portraits spanning four decades; Lorna Simpson, who links photography with conceptual and performative art; and Jochen Lempert, who was recognised for a self-titled exhibition that sought abstraction in every day objects.

A selection of Mosse's photographs from The Enclave, as well as the work of Simpson, Lempert and García-Alix, will be on show at the Photographer's Gallery until 22nd June.  

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