AbstractsCommunication

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how contemporary documentary is appropriating certain strategies that are traditionally only used in art, to question the difficulties of giving an accurate documentation of the world. A world that is never transparent or simple, conflicts and situations that are never black or white. For this I will look at the photographs by documentary photographer/artist Richard Mosse, as an example for the wider phenomenon in contemporary documentary, and investigate what strategies he uses to address the problems of documenting atrocities in Eastern Congo and narrating its complicated story to the viewers. I will investigate how the boundary between documentary and art in these strategies (and because of these strategies) is shifting, what the implications are and what effect this has on the viewers. For this thesis I will examine three main strategies Richard Mosse uses in his photographs: first, the use of a certain pre-determined concept and the negation of the decisive moment, as was long (at least until the 1980s) the characteristic of documentary photography and photojournalism. Second, the aesthetization of the documentary photograph and its increasing relationship to art and, third, the presentation of the work in both an installation form as well as the placement of these projects within a cultural and art institutional environment.