A Supplement to The Enclave by Richard Mosse and Others - Response

A Supplement to The Enclave by Richard Mosse and Others - Response

Quote:

Trevor Tweeten “No.  Not at all.  It was intense… when you have the camera in front of you it becomes a sort of filter, a sort of force field that what you see through the lens ceases to be reality and so it doesn’t have the same impact” (Mosse 9).

Response:

The words of Trevor Tweeten really struck me when I first read the conversation between him and Richard Mosse.  Typically the camera is a means of documenting a moment, but it never fully sees, never fully captures what is going on outside of the frame.  Although there is an illusion to what is going on outside of the frame, it is never absolute or concrete - unless of course more photos are taken.  Even with all of the photos in the world, there will always be limits that exist.  Both the photo and photographer share this struggle.  Coming from a photographer, I experience the “filter-effect” that many photographers experience from time to time.  It is almost a time warp that occurs when I am shooting photos.  One minute I am photographing and the next, the day has almost come to an end.  Being behind the camera is a completely different experience than just taking “mental pictures” so to speak.  There is a definite separation from reality when looking through the lens.  There are so many things to be focusing on when you have a camera and viewfinder in front of your face that it takes away from the visceral experience, one that you could almost touch, that is unfolding before your eyes.  I think that is also a reason as to why we can never fully understand what it is like for people in crisis that we see on TV, see images of, and read about.  We are not there to experience all of the bodies senses or see with our own two eyes, our surroundings.  Seeing something on TV or reading about it will never replicate the firsthand experience of it, and that is the conflict that imaging/photography is trying to combat.

Questions:

1. Working with a meaningful medium, in this case the Kodak Aerochrome film, can make a piece of art “speak” much more than any other - and it sure does in this case.  It begs the question, what is the limit of working with such an unstable medium?  Although the medium fits this project so nicely, is the fragility of the film in the process worth it in the end?
2. Why is it that fear is what turns the world around? (as stated by Richard Mosse)  Are we driven by our fears?  That seems very negative to me, but quite possibly very true.
3. I feel as though, from reading this, that we have perceived the world in a completely different way than we should.  Does the disjointedness of sources and information from different sources make us blindingly unaware of what is really going on?  Should we experience what is going on in the real world without a filter and in the flesh?

A Supplement to The Enclave by Richard Mosse.  2014.  A Broken Dimanche Press Publication.  Print.