Richard Mosse with Trevor Tweeten and Ben Frost. Incoming, 2017; installation view, the Barbican, London. Courtesy of the Barbican. Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images.

No matter race, age, origin, or legal status, while the human body performs the physiological processes that keep its vital functions intact, it radiates heat, thereby making it detectable to thermographic cameras like the ones used for military-grade surveillance. In Incoming, on view at the Barbican, Irish conceptual documentary photographer Richard Mosse repurposed heat-sensitive surveillance technology to create a powerful piece of humanist art: a portrait of today’s refugee crisis, registered in black-and-white signatures of relative temperature difference.

Flipping a dispassionate war mechanism to function as a subversive documentary tool, Mosse worked with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten to scan the land- and seascapes traversed by today’s staggering numbers of migrants: from Syria and Libya to Berlin; from Sahara Desert to the Calais camp. The photographic project is a chilling document of human suffering, yet resonates with a striking lyricism. The mesmerizing footage shows glowing ghosts—without identities, without origins—moving in slow motion through dark, otherworldly settings.

The exhibition’s titular piece is an immersive, multichannel video installation hidden inside the cavelike space of the Barbican’s Curve gallery. To arrive here, audiences move around the bend of the ninety-meter-long corridor, gaining an understanding of the thermal camera’s logic through photographic work that demonstrates how the device registers human activity with missile-like, depersonalized vision. Penetrating deeper into the darkened Curve, a contemplative quietude appropriately sets the tone–yet fails to prepare–for the horrors of Incoming’s main tour de force.

The large-scale video piece shows people clambering out of overloaded lifeboats, doctors trying to resuscitate drowned children, and rows of survivors traveling onward, their abstracted, spectral faces downcast in grief. The work’s most grueling scenes include dark, hypothermic bodies lying too still, or hot white hands zipping up body bags. Accompanied by composer Ben Frost’s highly effective score–which combines eerie ambient tones with the documentary noises of roaring helicopter blades, shouting rescue workers, and wailing women–the piece oscillates between documentation and abstraction, between intimacy and distance, making it ambivalent, unsettling, and highly effective.

The logic of the thermographic camera and its arresting aesthetic—abstracting, anonymizing, yet rooted in a universal, shared physiology—provides the crux to Incoming’s integrity and power. Mosse’s unique lens sets his work apart from the straight documentary images produced by mainstream media and makes viewable—palpable, even—the levels of human suffering we might otherwise wish to turn away from. Medium, content, and form present a piercing, ardent confrontation with the harrowing realities faced by fellow humans: their bodies warm, like ours, currently seeking refuge from inhumane conditions globally.

Richard Mosse: Incoming will be on view through April 23, 2017.

Eva Mak is an art historian and writer from Amsterdam, currently living in London. Her interests go out to politically engaged and challenging conceptual practices revealing both local and global perspectives.

Men Of Good Fortune, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2011. Photo credit: Richard Mosse

A military village emerges from the hills of hot pink. A soldier lurks in a crimson jungle. A man with a face erupted in scar tissue from a war trauma pauses for a portrait. Photographer Richard Mosse has captured the Congo using Kodak Aerochrome, a discontinued military surveillance film used to detect an invisible spectrum of infrared light, warping the hues of green into a landscape of lavender and revealing much more than an image shot on typical film would.

The Ireland-born photographer’s striking new series Infra — on view through December 23 at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City — documents a land of turbulent, shifting politics, systematic massacres, and unrelenting physical and sexual violence. These photographs are devastating in their reality and hauntingly beautiful in their creative form.

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On view through December 23, 2009 at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City is the new photographic series, The Fall, by Irish artist Richard Mosse. For the exhibition, Mosse has created a series of epic landscape-based documentary photographs that survey a variety of wreckage in remote locations such as the Patagonian Andes and the Yukon Territories. Images of downed planes, exploded cars, and dirt filled swimming pools become monolithic monuments of destruction, partially reclaimed by nature and left to slowly decompose. The artist embarked on this photographic journey as an embed with the US military. In a sense, the series is a rescue mission aimed at recovering, at least in image form, lost relics of globalization and archeology of our time.

The Fall marks the completion of the first year of a two-year Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Performing and Visual Arts. Mosse completed a postgraduate Degree in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths University in London in 2005, and an MFA in photography from Yale School of Art in 2008. The artist’s work will be included in the upcoming Fotofest 2010 Biennial of Contemporary U.S. Photography, March 12 – April 25, 2010, Houston, TX.