Richard Mosse’s Broken Spectre confronts a subject that resists ordinary photographic description. The destruction of the Amazon rainforest proceeds at scales too vast to picture, too gradual to register, and too embedded in global supply chains to see clearly. Beginning from these conditions, Mosse constructed a body of work that deliberately multiplies its own visual languages rather than settling on a single documentary register.
Published by Loose Joints in 2022, the book gathers 342 photographs and film stills across 440 pages, drawing on material made between 2018 and 2022 along several fronts of environmental crime and resistance in the Amazon Basin. Microscopic imagery describes the biome’s interdependent biology; monochrome infrared scenes track illegal mining, logging, burning, industrial agriculture, and Indigenous activism; airborne multispectral views, modelled on satellite imaging, register cleared land against surviving forest; ultraviolet botanical studies and heat-degraded analogue film bring the burning environment into the emulsion itself. The sequence moves between the topographic and the human, following Yanomami and Munduruku communities defending their territories as well as the miners and ranchers whose operations are dismantling them.
The volume is produced as a section-sewn debossed softcover on multiple paper stocks with gatefolds, accompanied by a 48-page booklet in English, Portuguese, Tupi-Mondé, and Yanomami, with texts by Txai Suruí, Christian Viveros-Fauné, Gabriel Bogossian, and Jon Lee Anderson, and an interview with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist. The multilingual apparatus is not decorative; it places the book’s address to Brazilian and Indigenous readerships on the same footing as its Euro-American audience.
For collectors, Broken Spectre is significant less as a document than as a sustained argument about what photography can be asked to do when the subject exceeds the frame. Its methods—multispectral capture, material degradation, GIS-derived aerial mapping—are inseparable from the book’s structure. Published in the months before Brazil’s 2022 general election, it carries a specific historical charge, and Mosse’s earlier publications, including Infra and Incoming, establish this as a further and more ambitious extension of that inquiry.
