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April 30, 2012
Edward Burtynsky is well known for his large-format photographs of industrial landscapes amongst other subjects that refer to, and represent,"the industrial sublime" or "the toxic sublime" in western capitalism.
Edward Burtynsky, Highway 1, Intersection 105 & 110, Los Angeles California, USA, 2003
Burtynsky has also photographed Australian mining landscapes in Western Australia. This series of photographs was taken in 2007 and continues Burtynsky's interest in the global human effect on the natural environment.
The series continues Burtynsky's interest in the global human effect on the natural environment.
In his analysis of Burkynsky's work Jonathan W. Marshall says:
Burtynsky began taking photographs of the North American hinterland in the early 1980s. Strongly influenced by the cool revelation of banal beauty and ordinary ugliness executed by the Bechers and the American New Topographers of the 1970s, Burtynsky initially focussed on marginal settlements which mixed urbanity with the rural in what might be read as a commentary on Canada's stockade mentality, whereby Northern American settlement has often been figured as a defensive extension of technology linking fortified blocks through railroads, telegraph lines and other melancholy signs of an endless battle with Nature in the far north.
These themes are a key feature of Canadian Modernist art, as in the work of the Group of Seven painters (Tom Thomson, A.Y. Jackson, J.E.H. MacDonald, and others, 1920-33).
Burtynsky's first major series was devoted to railcuts: the passage of train tracks through an inhospitable environment across which human designers have engineered an aggressive scarification of the land. Whilst still to some degree reflecting a specifically national aesthetic, charting the ambivalent violence of the Canadian frontier wherein technology has served as a tool of both civilisation and alienation, many of the major characteristics which were to define Burtynsky's oeuvre were already visible.
Marshall says that these characteristics include:
human technology and capitalism as violent forces which radically transform the landscape to produce spectacles even more awesome and sublime than those they replace ("industrial incursions into the landscape", as Burtynsky has described them; nd); technology as an interlinked nexus whose function is to create associations between places, landscapes, societies and capital; large scale imagery filled with detail, especially that of the stressed, fractured surface (rock faces, and so on); a tendency towards an abstracted vision of place in line with what Philip Goldswain has called the New Topographics' perspective of the "empty terrain vague of the American city" (... or the similarly depopulated vistas of Canada's own Group of Seven painters ....; and a photographic practice increasingly based on tracing thematic concepts and categorical definitions across a visually diverse but aesthetically formalised and unified visual field (railcuts, mines, quarries, tailings, the extraction and consumption of oil, etcetera).
Burtynsky's wide but precise cropping, his organised viewing of potentially chaotic visual material, and the clear delineations of blocks of tonality and line which his imagery offers, was to define his mature style from this period onwards.
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