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Richard Mosse wants to seduce you into contemplating the Congo

Richard Mosse on his Deutsche Börse Photography Prize-winning installation, The Enclave.
Want to see more of Richard Mosse's striking images? Continue to the bottom of this post to see a gallery of his work.

Jian speaks with Irish artist Richard Mosse, the newly-announced winner of Europe's most prestigious photography award: the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. The photographer offers insight into his beautiful but unsettling multimedia installation, The Enclave -- a project that re-frames and literally re-colours scenes from eastern Congo.

Mosse explains what has drawn him to conflict zones since his early 20s, why "impossible" photographs are at the heart of his work, and why he chose to work with discontinued infrared film that produces bubble-gum pink images.

"When viewer is seduced by the beauty, usually they realize that they're deriving aesthetic pleasure from human suffering," he tells Jian. "My approach was to try to make people feel something. So it's a kind of advocacy of seeing, to make people see. It's about perception."

"To go back to the film medium itself, it sees infrared light. Infrared light is invisible to human eye. So it really is about registering the unseen and overlooked. And the eastern Congo conflict is massively overlooked."

Below you'll find a selection of images from Richard Mosse's Deutsche Börse Photography Prize-winning installation, The Enclave. Please note that some of the images are graphic, and may not be appropriate for younger or sensitive viewers.