Race, Climate Change and the Photographic Negative in Richard Mosse’s Heat Maps

Abstract

How might the production, transference and registration of heat allow us to see mass displacement differently? Through a close reading of Richard Mosse’s series, Heat Maps (2016) – which uses a heat-sensitive, military grade surveillance camera to capture refugees in camps and detention centres in and around the Mediterranean – this article considers heat as a byproduct of colonialism, and as an elemental force driving global displacement. While Mosse’s photographs visualise unseen (body) heat through shifts in tonal value, these seemingly transparent images risk obscuring the other ways heat is produced through resource extraction, sexual violence and embodied resistance to colonisation. Reading Mosse’s work through the racial anxieties that have historically accompanied the photographic negative, the article attempts to unravel the invisibility of the white gaze in contemporary art’s capturing of the refugee crisis, while at the same time holding out hope for the reparative and imaginative capacities of the viewer.