The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies is hosting Edward Burtynsky: The Residual Landscapes
For more info go to www.edwardburtynsky.com
Burtynsky is one of Canada's most prominent photographers, made famous by the documentary Manufactured Landscapes. His photos are in galleries around the world including the National Gallery of Canada and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris, the MOMA and the Guggenheim in New York. The opportunity to see his work in its life-sized glory in Banff is a special treat. These are incredible pieces of scale and seeing them in a book as a small reproduction does not do them justice.
Burtynsky's photos are of scarred landscapes changed by industry. These are haunting pictures, simultaneously beautiful and horrible. They are seriously disturbing images: he is exposing the oil, mining and other heavy industries' dark side, the side that most people never get to see. By exposing this, he brings the real effects of our consumer lifestyle into our consciousness. As a consumer most days, I don't think about how the product got to me, I just see the lovely product on sale at the shop. But this photographer, by his amazing ability to scope out the details and the whole picture at once, forced me to understand the universal scale of this big economic and social experiment we call the modern world. It is truly scary stuff, and I think overwhelming to anyone of conscience. But weirdly, although I was looking at evidence of worrisome pollution at an incomprehensible scale, I was also seeing gorgeous images characterized by beauty and symmetry as well. In his photo "Oxford Tire Piles #8", he is shooting from above a landfill dump of millions of chalky, deflated automotive tires in Westley California. In the centre of the photo runs a brown fault line of reddish dirt. When I saw this photo, my reaction was immediate: "I drove here. I participated in this mess, I own a car and like the convenience of it. I drove here to Banff today, I put on new snow tires last month so I could get to see this very exhibit". My responsibility for, and connection to this pile of tires is obvious and awful. But there is something else going on here too: I also saw a stunning and gorgeous photo, the nip of yellowish- green grass poking from the background that runs seemlessly into the amber road of earth. It is a perfect composition and is strangely calming when I can forget for a moment the reality of it. This is wonderful stuff and I want to see more.
I think that the most startling image of the exhibit is the oft-shown Nickel Tailings series, I saw image #30, from Sudbury Ontario. When I was looking at this photo I had to keep reminding myself that this was man-made, not a natural thing. It was so wondrous and pretty that I felt the way I do witnessing the Northern Lights or a harvest moon. Even though my thinking self had to keep saying that this harvest fed us with toxins and death. This duality of emotion is so strong for me while looking at these images. With just a camera this man had me thinking about the context and limits of human knowledge and understanding. I was pondering how amazing the human mind is, that we can conceive of two competing realities and yet on another level cannot accept it. I cannot split into two minds, though these photos ask that of me.
The largest series of the exhibit was the series on the Alberta Oil Sands, taken in Fort McMurray in 2007. From the tiny photo in the exhibit brochure, the flat greenish field with the pretty finger-like patterns in pale yellow, looks like a tennis court, bordered by neat grey, divided in the middle by a row of short, orderly posts. On closer inspection the "green" of the "court" is actually a huge pool of poisonous waste sulphur. When I walked around that room and saw these giant images surrounding me, all hung together like that, I fully understood the vastness of this experiment and the scope of this man's work to photograph it. It is a respectable chore, one Burtynksy undertakes at great risk to his own health, and as a society we need it. We are indeed ready for this.
In his artist statement Burtynsky says "These images are meant as metaphors for the dilemma of our modern existence, they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear". I felt all these complex and competing emotions and to me this is what art does and why we need it in our society!
The Globe and Mail did an amazing in depth feature on the Alberta Oil Sands, narrated by Burtynsky and showing Burtynsky's photos see here for the link:
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