Richard Mosse – The Castle (Second Edition)

The Castle is a meticulous documentation of refugee camps and staging sites along mass migration routes into the European Union via Turkey from the Middle East and Central Asia. The result of numerous preparatory visits, often revealing changing immigration policy, Richard Mosse has filmed each site from high elevation to reveal camps that are frequently closed, off-limits or restricted to photographers. By attaching a thermographic video camera designed for long-range border enforcement and insurgent detection to a robotic motion control arm, Mosse has gathered the source footage used to composite the resulting ‘heat maps’. These durational photographs are thermal panoramas made up of hundreds, or sometimes thousands, of overlapping ‘cells’ or individual frames, a truncated spatio-temporal form that speaks to the lived experience of refugees indefinitely awaiting asylum and trapped in a Byzantine state of limbo.

232 pages, hardcover, 32 x 24.5 cm, MACK (London).