Richard Mosse, Safe From Harm, North Kivu, eastern Congo, 2012 Digital C print, 48 x 60 inches © Richard Mosse Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery

Richard Mosse wins the Deutsche Börse Prize

The Irish photographer’s Congo images, The Enclave, pick up the annual photography award

We first wrote about Richard Mosse’s Congo photographs back in 2011. These pictures, then dubbed Infra, captured the landscapes and combatants of eastern Africa’s on-going civil conflict on Kodak Aeorchrome, a discontinued type of coloured infrared film originally used by military surveillance to detect camouflage, though later employed in psychedelic rock photography.

Mosse’s subsequent series, The Enclave, used the same film stock and subjects, was shown in the Irish pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale, and was awarded the 2014 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize last night in London. The jury praised Mosse’s images for combining “form and content to draw attention to a conflict, which despite costing the lives of millions of people has largely gone unnoticed by the West."

 

Vintage Violence, 2011, by Richard Mosse.
Vintage Violence, 2011, by Richard Mosse.

This terrible conflict, sometimes described as the Second Congo War, was caused in part by an overspill of violence from the Rwandan genocide and has, according to some estimates, claimed 5.4 million lives since 1998.

Mosse wins the annual prize of £30,000, which is awarded to a photographer of any nationality for his or her significant contribution to the medium of photography either through an exhibition or publication, in Europe between 1 October 2012 and 30 September 2013.

 

From Infra, 2010 Richard Mosse
From Infra, 2010 Richard Mosse

Find out more about the prize and the show, which runs at the Photographers’ Gallery in London until 22 June, here. Browse through a gallery of Mosse’s images here; gain a deeper understanding of contemporary photography by buying a copy of our new The Photo Book; the photographer Richard Wentworth who presented Mosse with the prize is featured in the book. And for more award-winning photographic coverage of international conflict, consider our books, Questions Without Answers, Magnum Stories and the intense but incredible Inferno by James Nachtwey.