Photo: Edward Burtynsky.
“Manufacturing #17, Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Dehui City, Jilin Province” (2005) is one of Burtynsky‘s best-known large-scale photos of China’s industrialization of just about everything.
The International Center of Photography in New York City recently hung an exhibit of Edward Burtynsky, a photographer I’ve admired since I first encountered his massive works in the early 2000s.
Louis Bury at Hyperallergic calls the show “A God’s-Eye-View of Earth’s Destruction.,” which doesn’t sound like fun but is sure to be interesting.
“Edward Burtynsky: The Great Acceleration,” writes Bury, “at the International Center of Photography contains the artist’s largest ever print, which is saying something. Across a celebrated 40-plus-year career, Burtynsky has been renowned for his work’s ambition and scalar play. His fantastic images, often taken from aerial vantages, depict landscapes modified by human industry, from a stepped mine resembling an amphitheater … to a salt pan whose multicolored pond rows evoke a painter’s palette. …
“The large formats and supra-human perspectives render the Earth alien, potentially confronting the viewer not only with our species’ collateral ecological harms but also our estrangement from them.
“Even by that standard, the exhibition’s 28-by-28-foot mural Pivot Irrigation #8, High Plains, Texas Panhandle, USA (2012) stands out. The distant overhead view and subdued color palette transform farmland into an almost abstract composition, in which the pictorial space is divided into textured, geometric browns on one side and alternating vertical stripes of washed out blues and grays on the other. A teensy farmstead occupies the bottom left corner and the roads running parallel to the edges of the picture plane serve as a clever framing device.
“But the two-story-tall print’s physical size produces its most dramatic effects. It dominates the central gallery, dwarfing visitors in a manner akin to the quarry cliffs that sometimes loom over the ant-like human figures in Burtynsky’s other landscapes, such as the miners digging for cobalt, for a couple dollars a day, in ‘Dry Tailings #1, Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of Congo’ (2024).
“Curator David Campany’s approach encapsulates the ‘bigger is better’ ethos. … The scope of the artist’s environmentalist muckraking matches the scope of the iniquities it portrays; for decades, Burtynsky has pursued research leads around the globe to capture yet more examples of civilization’s terraforming. Early in his career, before the term ‘Anthropocene’ became common in academic and artistic circles, such images offered a prescient vision of large-scale anthropogenic changes that were typically out of sight and out of mind.
“But as others have caught up to and even surpassed that vision … its style has remained mostly the same, god’s-eye-view consciousness raising feels more and more like a pretext for aesthetic dazzle.
“Burtynsky’s dazzle serves a psychological rather than a moral function. It can provoke in viewers the uncomfortable recognition that harmful ecological realities nonetheless appear beguiling. But it can also occlude the human-scaled implications of those realities. On the central gallery’s terrace level, Campany has helpfully included examples of Burtynsky’s lesser known work: early 1980s portraits of food plant laborers; studies of marshlands taken during the COVID-19 lockdown. While these series lack the wow factor of the artist’s panoramic work, they evidence his eye for formal patterns and keen details. …
“[The show] continues at the International Center of Photography (84 Ludlow Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through September 28.”
Fantastic photos at Hyperallergic, here. No firewall. See also Photographic Journal, here, and the artist’s site, here.
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