Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky

The Exhibit Manufactured Landscapes consists of several large galleries filled with Edward Burtynsky's beautiful, large-format, color photographs of railcuts, mines and tailings, quarries, oil fields and refineries, and shipbreaking. Works like Nickel Tailings [.sup.#]34, Sudbury, Ontario (1996), with its glowing red river cutting a swath across a blackened landscape, lure viewers in with mesmerizing detail and all-but-indecipherable subject matter. At first glance, the image looks like nothing so much as the awe-inspiring face of another planet. As particulars emerge, however, the landscape reveals itself for what it is: a stream of oxidized iron residue left in the wasted wake of the process of ore extraction. Throughout this exhibition, Burtynsky's work thrives on precisely such unsettling combinations of visceral beauty and cognitive revulsion, on effects of ambiguity and dissonance. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Some critics have reverted to notions of the sublime to explain this effect. In the temporal move between the confusions of scale and misrecognition of subject that accompany first views of the photographs and the rational containment that follows, Burtynsky's work could certainly be explained in such terms. It might also be understood in terms of what the philosopher Paul Ziff would call acts of aspection. We separate out the pleasure of viewing the color and composition of Nickel Tailings from the abhorrence of the environmental degradation that underlies them. But such readings would only evade a deeper, perhaps more problematic dynamic at play in Burtynsky's work: its politics. Burtynsky's oeuvre constantly flirts with misreading. It seems only a step away from a covert neo-liberal apology for the exploitation of the natural environment (even an environmental holocaust doesn't look so bad!) or, even worse, mere post-modernist irony (good thing we know better than to take beauty too seriously!). To be sure, the ambiguity of the images does not admit for their easy assimilation to a political-documentary tradition--Burtynsky is no Sebastiao Salgado--but there is undeniably a critical consciousness at work here. The thematic progress of Burtynsky's project, from mineral and oil extraction to oil refineries to the breaking down of tankers that once transported the oil, indicates a sensibility well-attuned to the economic structures at work in the transformation of raw material into commodities and back again. Burtynsky was born near the U.S. border in St. Catherines, Ontario, in 1955, and pursued photography from a young age. After studying at Ryerson Polytechnic Institute in Toronto, he worked largely in black and white photography in the early 1980s. The current show begins with work from 1985 and proceeds, in roughly chronological fashion, nearly to the present. The photographs are almost all dye-coupler color prints, and all fairly large. The first half of the exhibition consists primarily of photographs of railcuts across sloping cliffs in western Canada, of stripmines in the American West, of quarries in Vermont and Italy, of nickel and uranium tailings in Ontario. Like early expeditionary photographers in the American West--Carleton Watkins was apparently an early influence--Burtynsky uses a large-format camera, and often takes hours and days to get the right shot of his motif. Indeed, such works as Railcuts [.sup.#]4, C.N. Track, Thompson River, British Columbia (1985) and Abandoned Marble Quarries [.sup.#]1, near Rutland Vermont (1991) reveal the impact of nineteenth-century landscape photography in their unpeopled and even-detailed surfaces. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Though his working conditions have remained fairly constant, Burtynsky's more recent work shows less concern with the compositional tropes of landscape photography. The images of tire graveyards and metal scrap-piles from the late 1990s evoke more than anything the pictorial abstraction of twentieth-century avant-garde painting. …

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