) Manufactured Landscapes – oscillistor

Manufactured Landscapes

Manufactured Landscapes is the title of an Edward Burtynsky photography exhibition, an accompanying large-format print publication, and a later documentary film adaptation in collaboration with filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier.

Artforum's Gregory Williams describes the reading of Burtynsky's photographs as having a clarity [leading] to a kind of postindustrial confrontation with a sublime nature heavily deformed by human activity. In Raffi Khatchadourian's profile for The New Yorker, Burtynksy's practice is situated as grand expeditionary photography from the turn of the twentieth century, when naturalism and modernism pushed up against each other.

References

documentary adaptation

Burtynsky's large-format photography book Manufactured Environments, published by Yale University Press, along with his collection China, https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/projects/the-anthropocene-project large-format book Yale University Press https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0832903/ https://www.metacritic.com/movie/manufactured-landscapes/ including the subsequent Water Line and Anthropocene: the Human Epoch, part of The Anthropocene Project It is notated for its Laurel Ptak, on Burtynsky's Brooklyn Museum exhibition, writes in an Apeture magazine review:
He thought of spent quarries as inverted skyscrapers—evidence that matter had been shifted from one area to another—and his pictures were so thoroughly stripped of political motivation that it was hard to imagine them working in the service of either industry or environmentalism. NYT
Burtynsky urges his audience to pay attention to the visual scars that capitalism and industry have left on our surroundings. These are human-altered landscapes that we might otherwise never see, and Burtynsky asks that we look at them and consider the environmental and social ramifications of our actions. But while he nods to the consequences of global consumerism, he never exactly takes up the larger stakes that his photographs raise. Burtynsky describes his photographic work as neither a condemnation nor a celebration of his subject matter.
Over the past twenty-five years, the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has been an explorer of unfamiliar places where modern industrial activity has reshaped the surface of the land. His astonishing photographs of the landscapes of mining, quarrying, railcutting, recycling, oil refining, and shipbreaking have about them an unexpected and almost sublime beauty. National Gallery of Canada
Focusing on Burtynsky's images of China as it undergoes an unprecedented transformation into a 21st century powerhouse, the film’s surface is beautiful, its implications frightening. Largely shot by Peter Mettler, it captures a brave new world that manages to be both luscious and unutterably repellent, often simultaneously. Film Forum
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