Slideshow

Slide Show: Reactions to Richard Mosse's Fascinating War Photographs

March 12, 2015

I saw. . . waters and pink shrubs. Men and women with guards. Grasses that hid the soldiers from death. Death found them anyway. I heard . . . a lullaby over the water. I don’t know the words but they sound hopeful. A deafening buzz, a heavy screech. App

This piece goes beyond art, beyond war, beyond a political message. A poignant reality of truth, the desolation of people and the humanization of war .We need more of this. The realization of the games of politics and war. This was tragic and beautiful.

I saw . . .images of haunting beauty and savagery. I heard . . . escalating, powerful vibrato. I felt . . .moved and saddened, the faces were haunting.

The power (instinctual) of life force – alive even in dire situations and circumstances.

Why weren’t the people of the Tulsi town given cameras? What is this art meant to do?

White guy photographs conflict in DRC. We can do better. I saw . . . exploitation.

This is one of the most engrossing and overwhelming works of art I have seen in a long time. At once hyper-real and almost surrealistically alien – I described it to my friend as Kubrick makes a documentary about Africa – it made me think of the end of 2

Pervasive white male gaze - as usual.

I felt sad because people were taking each other’s land. I also felt worried.

An otherworldly landscape that gives some sense of suffering unimaginable from our Portland oasis. I felt . . . sorrow, powerless.

The Portland Art Museum has extended its run of 'The Enclave,' an immersive multimedia meditation on the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, due to extraordinary public interest. Photographer Richard Mosse's work, which defamiliarizes both the genre of war photography and tropes of African suffering through haunting images in electric hues of pink, blue, and crimson, has elicited strong reactions from the thousands of Portlanders who have already attended the show. To facilitate engagement and conversation, the museum provided comment cards to visitors at the exhibit. These cards, many of which are now on display through the museum’s Tumblr, provide a fascinating window into the at times emotional, at times incisive reactions of Portlanders to The Enclave’s devastating sounds and images. Click through the slide show to see a selection of the comment cards, a documentary view of our city’s reaction to—in Mosse’s words—“narratives so painful that they exist beyond language.”

The Enclave will be on display until April 12 at the Portland Museum of Art, 1219 SW Park Ave.

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