Mosse pushes photography's limits to sound an urgent warning about catastrophic destruction in the Amazon rainforest.
Devastation in the Amazon rainforest and the climate change it drives tend to unfold in ways too vast to comprehend, too minute to perceive and too normalised to see. In an attempt to represent the scale and urgency of the Amazon's extensive, impending collapse, Richard Mosse's most ambitious work to date employs a dazzling range of photographic techniques.
Broken Spectre is an immersive 74-minute film moving between ecological narratives, from the topographic to the anthropocentric, and a close examination of violence and non-human survival. Mosse and his team spent years documenting different fronts of destruction, degradation and environmental crime in the Amazon basin and related ecosystems.
Broken Spectre operates at multiple scales: fluorescent, inky microscopic imagery describes the Amazon biome's interdependent complexity in scientific detail, while cinematic monochrome infrared scenes trace illegal mining, logging and burning, industrial agriculture and Indigenous activism.
Meanwhile, aerial multispectral images starkly reveal vast tracts of empty land against lush rainforest, showing the immense scale and systematic organisation of the Amazon's destruction.
In the accompanying photographic works, Mosse makes the invisible visible through multispectral cameras emulating satellite imaging technology, alongside ultraviolet botanical studies and heat-sensitive analogue film warped, mottled and degraded by the oppressive environment and the burning forest itself. These experimental documentary works are accompanied by Mosse's hypnotically vivid aerial maps, which zoom out and render the scale and extent of natural destruction in penetrating colour detail, employing specially designed Geographic Information System (GIS) imaging technology.
As climate change continues to define our era and the planet's future, Mosse witnesses a rapidly unfolding catastrophe. Scientific studies cited in the publication predict that the Amazon is nearing a tipping point at which it would no longer generate rainfall, causing widespread forest dieback and devastating carbon release, with consequences for climate change, biodiversity and local and international communities. Mosse shows the human sides of the tragedy: Yanomami and Munduruku Indigenous communities struggling to survive; illegal gold miners poisoning and destroying entire river systems for tiny handfuls of gold; and Brazilian cowboys deliberately burning pristine surroundings to create cattle pasture supplying international meat and leather markets.
Created between 2018 and 2022, Broken Spectre was published before Brazil's consequential general election in which Jair Bolsonaro lost the presidency. Bolsonaro and his administration decimated Brazil's environmental protection agencies and opened the floodgates to deforestation, exponentially accelerating the Amazon's destruction. The publication argues that had Bolsonaro won his 2022 campaign, the Amazon's fate might have been sealed forever.
