This chapter explores the unprecedented formal experiments of Richard
Mosse and Ai Weiwei in their attempts to capture the signature global
event of our time, the mass movements of refugees and immigrants across
geopolitical boundaries. In Mosse’s Incoming, a thermal camera registers
the heat emanating from human bodies from some 30 miles away, providing
images of refugees in lifeboats, transport trucks, and refugee camps
that are both other-worldly, almost mutant in their strangeness, and
deeply moving—images that rivet the gaze. In Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow,
drone cameras render the vast scale of human displacement around the
world—a view from above is interspersed with the close witnessing of cell
phone video, using the visual language of spontaneous documentation in
counterpoint with a technology associated with military surveillance. In
both films, Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life” is articulated within
an advanced optical and technological framework that brings new critical
questions into view.