The photographs of Ukrainian Canadian Edward Burtynsky (10/16/05)

The photographs of Ukrainian Canadian Edward Burtynsky

by Alexandra Hawryluk

The volcanic orange river winding its way across a desolate black plain fringed with grey leafless trees might well be the river Styx encompassing Hades. The arresting power, the awful beauty and the grandiose scale of this bleak landscape titled "Nickel Tailings #34, Sudbury, Ontario 1996," is what art and photography enthusiasts have come to expect from the Ukrainian Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky.

Throughout 2004 the exhibit "Manufactured Landscape: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky" has been enthralling visitors to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Ontario Art Gallery in Toronto and Le Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montréal. This year, the retrospective exhibit of Mr. Burtynsky's work, organized and circulated by the National Gallery of Canada, is being shown at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego (March 20-June 5), the Iris and B. Ferald Cantor Centre for Visual Arts at Stanford University in California (June 29-September 18) and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York (September 23-December 11).

* * *

Some 25 years ago, while driving through the state of Pennsylvania in search of untouched nature, Edward Burtynsky took the wrong road. On cresting a rise in the land, he was astonished to see nothing but hill upon hill of black coal-slag.

In and interview with Michael Torosian, ("The Essential Element," published by the National Gallery of Canada in association with Yale University Press, 2004) Mr. Burtynsky said: "White birch trees were growing up through the black mounds, and ponds were full of lime green water. It was surreal. Slowly I turned 360 degrees, and in that entire horizon there was nothing virgin. It totally destabilized me. I thought, is this the earth? I had never seen anything transformed on this scale."

In fact, the pictures taken that day in Frackvllle, Pa., launched the artistic career of this remarkable Canadian from St. Catharines, Ontario. Today, his photographs grace the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress, the National Gallery in Washington, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and La Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.

The "Manufactured Landscapes" exhibit, a National Gallery of Canada mid-career retrospective, comprises 64 large color photographs taken from different series produced over the last 20 years: "Railcuts" (1985), "Quarrie" 1991-1992), "Tailing" (1995-1996), "Urban Mines" (1997 and 2001), "Oxford Tire Pile" (1999), "Oil Refineries" (1999 and 2001), "Makrana Marble Quarries" (2000), "Shipbreaking" (2000-2001) and "Oil Fields" (2001-2002). In all of these series, "he documents the ruins of our time, the landscapes touched by man, transformed by industry, but always with the eye of the photographer, the eye of an artist," explained Sandra Grant, the curator of the Burtynsky exhibit at the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montreal.

However, Mr. Burtynsky neither condemns, nor celebrates industry. As he himself puts it in a video accompanying the show: "I am really saying that these things exist ... I'm bearing witness to these things and you read them. You take it from there. You take half of that equation and you tell me what you think. So, I see it is a kind of shared experience with the viewer."

And indeed, it is a shared experience.

"The visitors are amazed by the beauty of the landscape portrayed by Burtynsky, but at the same time, they are very troubled by what they are seeing," observed Ms. Grant.

In his mining series, in the photograph titled "Mines #22, Kennecott Copper Mine, Bingham Valley, Utah, 1985," the graceful consecutive curves cut into a rocky mountainside bring to mind ancient Roman amphitheaters. It is only on noticing the lilliputian trucks and train cars clustered at the very bottom of this super arena that one begins to grasp the vast scale of man's intrusion into nature.

On the other hand, in his railway pictures the power of nature seems to overwhelm the daring efforts of man: the massive rock cliff pictured in "Railcuts #4, C.N. Track, Thompson River, British Columbia, 1985" fills the frame, obliterates the sky, and reduces the transcontinental railway to a fragile line of metal etched across the bottom of the rock.

At other times, Mr. Burtynsky's lense turns industrial waste into breathtaking compositions, as in the case of "Oxford Tire Pile #8, Wesley, California, 1999," where a shallow canyon, illuminated by the soft light of dawn, runs through dark hills of used tires. Even heaps of discarded telephones, oil filters and auto parts outside Hamilton, Ontario, take on the beauty of well-designed abstract paintings.

Nothing seems ordinary when viewed through Burtynsky's lens: the pattern of light and shadow in his "Oil Refineries #3, Oakville, Ontario, 2001" lend the pipeline system a lyrical air, while the cut up carcasses of abandoned cargo ships, reflected in the wet Bangladesh beach, have the majestic presence of ruined metal monuments of an unknown civilization.

Although the unexpected beauty of these manufactured landscapes impresses viewers deeply, it also elicits perplexing reflections on various aspects of industrial development and its impact on the future of our planet. The photographs also make it clear, as Mr. Burtynsky himself puts it, that "All the things we inhabit, all the things we possess, the material world that we are surrounded with, all comes from nature." (Mr. Torosian, "The Essential Element") The cars we drive, the aeroplanes we fly in, the high-rise buildings we live and work in, are the end products of our exploitation of nature. Nevertheless, "Burtynsky doesn't like to define very strictly or very narrowly his work in terms of moral or political implications," noted the curator of the Montreal exhibit. Yet, it is this restrained attitude of the artist that lends his pictures their power and authority.

Perhaps nothing speaks to the viewer more strongly than his newest work, "Before the Flood" - large-format color photographs of the Three Gorges Dam project on the Yangtze River in China, the biggest hydro-electric project in the world. There, the price of progress was the destruction of 13 cities, 140 towns, 1,352 villages, a number of archeological sites and the resettlement of 1.9 million people. Mr. Burtynsky's 4x5 view camera captured the Chornobyl-like landscape of gutted apartment buildings, windowless houses and rubble-strewn streets just hours before they disappeared under flood waters forever. Not surprisingly, these are the pictures that drew most comments; these are the pictures that garnered him the Roloff Beny Award and the Applied Arts Magazine Photographic Book Award in 2004.

Like great artists before him, Mr. Burtynsky transforms visual experience, changes our perception of reality. If Turner changed the way we perceive light, and Archipenko changed the way we look at mass and form - Edward Burtynsky, changes the way we see the relation between nature and humanity. He simply tells the truth as he sees it. Moreover, the breadth of his vision reaches epic proportions and lifts the ugly vistas of industrial detritus unto the level of the sublime.

Alexandra Hawryluk is a writer living in Montreal.

| Home Page |