What’s a War-Torn African Nation Got To Do with Editing DNA?
WIRED illustrated its cover story about genetic engineering with a bubble-gum pink photo of a hillside in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The choice raises some questions.
If the photo hadn’t been so instantly recognisable, I’d not be writing this.
Richard Mosse’s candy-colored portraits of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) which he made while the country was in the depths of civil war are unforgettable.
If the photo hadn’t been so instantly recognisable, I would not have assumed that the cover story inside was about DRC, or about civil strife or conflict generally.
The cover story The Genesis Engine, by Amy Maxman, is about a gene-editing technique called Crispr-Cas9. Crispr is an acronym for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” and Cas9 is the protein that is at operation in the editing.
Specifically, the article is about the science behind Crispr and the patent battle currently raging in the courts to wrest control of a royalties windfall worth in the billions of dollars. Plenty of A’s, T’s, G’s and C’s but not a bit of DRC.
Pink hills?
Mosse spent several years making trips into the Kivu region of DRC and capturing footage. The photos are collected as the series Infra (2010–2011) and the videos were assembled as a multi-screen installation Enclave (2013) which debuted at the 2013 Venice Biennale and has since travelled worldwide.
Both Infra and Enclave were made using the discontinued Aerochrome film which picks up infrared light invisible to the human eye. It processes greens as pinks, magentas and reds. The film was used by the U.S. military who, through its use, were able to detect camouflage (dark spots) amid the fuchsia-seeming foliage. Chlorophyll reflects infrared light more readily than cargo nets, then.
The film is highly fragile and, incredibly, Mosse had to refrigerate it almost without interruption while in the field. “[It] will expire after just seven days at room temperature. I have to keep it cold at all times, carrying it through Congo in beer coolers, and have to find a freezer wherever I go. As you can imagine, that’s a serious task in a sub-Saharan war zone,” he once said.
The Artist
Infra and Enclave are landmark works of art. From concept, to execution, to exhibition, they are both masterful. There is no denying . Infra and Enclave simultaneously take on our assumptions about how certain issues (war, environment, news) can, or should, be portrayed while also subverting an old military apparatus for the purposes of a modern-day critique of global relations, information exchange, geopolitics and trade. The fact that much of the civil strife in DRC is over mining and mineral control and the fact that China purchases over 50% of said minerals to manufacture electronic devices cannot be lost.
The deeper you go, the more Infra and Enclave make absolute sense, especially when you listen to Mosse talk about its different aspects (video below). Both projects are unlikely (artists going into a war zone), steadfast (massive cost and logistics taken in stride), complex (how is it that murdering soldier can entertain me so?) and good art (you can’t look away from the pink).
Mosse is not a photojournalist; he is an artist working in regions that have commonly been portrayed in images by photojournalists. Any past arguments trying to hold Mosse to journalism’s code of ethics were laid to bed some time ago.
The work is provocative precisely because it avoids the overt descriptions typical of news photography. We have to do more with Infra than passively accept the victim/villian distinctions made in photos of crouched refugees, maimed children, mortar-firing soldiers, for example. And Mosse is deliberate with this.
Mosse has explained that his effort was to put “two counter-worlds into collision: art’s potential to represent narratives so painful that they exist beyond language, and photography’s capacity to document specific tragedies and communicate them to the world.”
Infra and Enclave are, in some ways, protests against the ineffectiveness of the (photojournalists’) image. Mosse chose to go to DRC because the disparity between how little the world knew and the massive scale of the carnage was most pronounced. The series of wars that have rumbled on in the Democratic Republic of Congo over the past half-century have claimed 5.4 million victims.
Why then did Wired opt to use a photograph which is ENTIRELY about a war and SPECIFICALLY about war in Congo for its cover story about biotech breakthroughs in the research institutes of the United States’ top universities?
The Decision
Whatever the decision making process was in the Wired offices, the bottom line is they made a call to Richard Mosse who approved use and licensing of the image Myths of the Near Future.
Once art exists in the world it is relatively untethered; it is consumed and interpreted freely. I don’t want to overthink Wired’s choice — I don’t think it’s sinister, I just think it’s confusing. Does Mosse’s permission, granted in return for payment, let Wired off the hook? Should it? Wired took a shot, asked the question, and received the go ahead. Case closed, no? Well, kinda, but no.
Personally, I wish to see agents in the photography community — and industry — upholding the integrity of work. Whether the artist approves a license or not (and, therefore, adding to the countless interpretations out there) doesn’t change the effect that a magazine cover, in this instance, has in establishing a different associations and meanings of a work in the consciousness of wide swaths of folk.
Just because Mosse said yes, doesn’t make it a good solution. Nor does it make the outcomes predictable or right.
Perhaps, then, I am so discomfited because Mosse’s work makes so much more visual sense being bent ever-so-slightly for this futuristic narrative, than it does for its original intended political purpose?
A cover, if it is to be successful, must act as a visual lede to the main story within. This cover does that in spades. Recode DNA and we can grow blue tomatoes! Engineer genetic material and we can make pink trees! Science fiction and science fact tells us the rearrangement of DNA can alter physical characteristics. Seeing becomes believing. Dolly the sheep was living and breathing proof, we could manipulate nature. I get it. Drastic change which turns everything including our usual colour spectrum upside down must be significant and must be worth leafing through the mag for.
I must mention that, in light of 5.4 million deaths in DRC, the line “And the end of life as we know it” emblazoned in 48-font on the front cover, seems a little clumsy, but I’m too clueless about the magazine world for that to be my line of main inquiry. Someone else can muse over those loose words if they think there’s anything more in them than a disconnect between packaging and content typical of the marketplace.
Mosse’s image, Myths of the Near Future is much more easier to read as a chapter in some sort of scientific progress report than it is as a critique on the visual culture of war. I wish that were cynicism but I think its true.
If the work was old, I might be able to accept appropriation and repackaging, but Mosse isn’t two years out the field and this work began only five years ago. Some things are too fresh and too good and Infra and Enclave are two of those things. It’s okay for the irrelevant, has-been Johnny Rotten to sell out and flog credit cards, but I don’t think it is okay for Mosse to surrender this precious work to the editorial market. Yet.
The conflict in DRC goes on.
