The Castle.

2nd Edition. Photographs by Richard Mosse. Texts in a booklet by Judith Butler, Paul K Saint Amour, Behrouz Boochani, and Richard Mosse.

Mack, London, United Kingdom, 2018. English, 232 pp., black-and-white illustrations, 6¾x8½".

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2018 by:

Rixon Reed

~~Out of Print~~ Now in its Second Printing

"'The Castle' is white hot with the accumulated dismay of this confounding moment, a masterwork that ought to grieve and shame us collectively." – Teju Cole, The New York Times

"Epic [...] the haunting images reveal the scale of the challenge presented by this desperate human situation." – The Times

"[Mosse] documents some of the most extreme human tragedies of our times" – The Evening Standard

The Castle is a meticulous documentation of refugee camps and staging sites along mass migration routes into the European Union via Turkey from the Middle East and Central Asia. The result of numerous preparatory visits, often revealing changing immigration policy, Mosse has filmed each site from high elevation to reveal camps that are frequently closed, off limits, or restricted to photographers. By attaching a thermographic video camera designed for long range border enforcement and insurgent detection to a robotic motion control arm, Mosse has gathered the source footage used to composite the resulting “heat maps.” These durational photographs are thermal panoramas made up of hundreds or sometimes thousands of overlapping “cells” or individual frames, a truncated spatio-temporal form that speaks to the lived experience of refugees indefinitely awaiting asylum and trapped in a Byzantine state of limbo.

Describing space and perspective in ways that seem to echo depictions of medieval cityscapes, such as the Nuremberg Chronicle, these images document the fences, security gates, portaloos, loudspeakers, food queues, tents and temporary shelters of camp architecture. The various ways in which each camp interrelates with adjacent citizen infrastructure are made apparent—by turns marginal, ruderal, isolated, overlooked, concealed, integrated, dispersed, regulated, militarized—allowing the reader to meditate on the situations in which these people are forced to live, and what that shows us about the approach and policies of each host nation and community. Reading heat as both metaphor and index, The Castle allows the reader to meditate on the current conditions of refugees through ideas of hypothermia, exposure, climate change, mortality, and biopolitics.

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