Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Richard Mosse's Air Disaster

Richard Mosse's series Air Disaster examines air disaster simulations and on-the-ground training exercises for airport firefighters. When asked in an interview, Mosse had this to say about his motivation for photographically exploring catastrophe:

"The actual disaster is a moment of contingency and confusion. It's all over in milliseconds. It's hidden in a thick cloud of black smoke and you cannot even see it. Battles, ambushes, hijackings, air strikes, terrorism: it's the same with all of these, too. But the catastrophe lives on before the fact and after the fact, as this spectacle. That's why I wanted to photograph the air disaster simulators; they are the air disaster more than the thing itself. We have built in our airports these enormous, absurd, phallic structures with kerosene jets and water sprinklers. They are monuments to our own fear, made within the pared down, hyper-functional, green and black and grey symbolic order of militarized space."

You can read the entire interview here.











All photographs from the series Air Disaster
All Images © Richard Mosse