) Manufactured Landscapes – oscillistor

Manufactured Landscapes

Manufactured Landscapes is the title of an Edward Burtynsky photography exhibition, an accompanying large-format print collection, and a later documentary film adaptation in collaboration with filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier. [Shuster 2013] photography in ecological critique. the sublime is breathlessness at a distance that stays distant, and thus involves an uneasy relationship with forms of hands-on environmentalist activism. his photographs at first glance draw awe at the blown-up, crisp, glossy print (as big as 100 × 150 cm) and again with the scale of environmental devastation that wracks the large image. In such focus on the material and affective life of the stages of the commodity, Burtynsky only peripherally involves humans, which gives his work a post-human feel. These images are also post-human in the way they question scales of individual human agency, as the photographs of landscapes strewn with amassed or discarded resources respond to the agency of large machines much more than humans. Burtynsky’s work follows the lives of basic commodities including coal, oil, water, granite, and nickel, and he is noted for concentrating mostly on the initial extraction and the ultimate discarding of these objects, rather than on the various ways they are put to use. Consider by comparison a scene in Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes when, filming shipbreaking in Bangladesh, the camera is bathed in an immense rust cloud that coats the workers when they drop a huge slab of reddened steel. It is impossible to romanticize this image not just because of the content but also because the rust cloud even makes the film viewer squint and shield the eyes, bringing pain to a spectacular vision. All of his images show evidence of ghostliness, material loss, and environmental distress […] extraction and earthmoving create deep caves and angular shadows that look like huge open graves. The pipes and oil refinery mechanisms are already images of commodities undergoing virtualization, where flammable liquids sequestered from view meet engineering mathematics and futures trading. The physical and cultural conditions of recycling that are at the forefront of sustainability take on distinct shapes and gestures in Burtynsky’s photographs of dumps, recycling depots, and the deconstruction and reconstruction of cities in China. The visual tropes of the monomaniacal pile of a single object, the orderly stack, and the hoard of trash, along with actions such as sorting, melting, crushing, weighing, repurposing, reusing, rejecting, cracking, and burning, define his images of this stage of production. The image he takes of an old woman peacefully sorting materials on the stoop of her house confirms the anti-human proportions that recycling has taken. This woman has become a combination of machine and human, but instead of the sleek fantasies of the agile and techno-skilled cyborg, she is marked by the less glorious science fiction matters of junkyards, toxicity, and the manual labor of recycling small computer parts.

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.

The subject matter carries with it a lot of ideas and difficult ones at that, including where we are going with all of this technology. When I first started photographing I was shocked at the scale with which we drag out our natural resources. I think it could be the paramount issue of the day — how far can we go as a capitalist, consumer culture before the negative effects come back to haunt us.
We are surrounded by all kinds of consumer goods, and yet we are profoundly detached from the sources of those things. Our lifestyles are made possible by industries all around the world, but we take them for granted, as background to our existence. I feel that by showing those places which are normally outside our experience, but very much a part of our everyday lives, I can add to our understanding of who we are and what we are doing.
Railcuts Mines and Tailings Quarries Urban Mines Oil Fields and Refineries Shipbreaking # Edward Burtynsky: Traditions and Affinities Mark Haworth__en()Booth
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger; that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.
[2] Edmund Burke — Philisophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756)
I remember the first time I came to Toronto alone. I found myself looking up at the skyscrapers sixty and seventy stories high. I was bowled over by the scale at which we operate, the kind of things we can create. For things to be on this scale, I thought, there has to be something equally monumental in the landscape where we have taken all this material from. I felt that Newtonian law implied a reciprocal action in nature — a hole in the ground that meets the scale of the rising of the skyscrapers — and my task was to go in search of the evidence of that reciprocal action, to see what the residual world looked like.
# From Versus Portent: Edward Burtynsky's Endangered Landscapes Kenneth Baker
Burtynsky's [photography] cuts to the heart of our ambivalence about the twenty-first century world: undeniably humankind has achieved astonishing things — we see and use them every day — but at what cost? Today that question stains our conciousness of life like a birthmark, especially if we are priveleged enough to be or to identify with the achievers.
Viewers who see his work as a mere awestruck record of the vastness of industry in a global economy miss Burtynsky’s oblique but insistent emphasis on what the camera inevitably excludes. There, if anywhere, lies the truth that is left to photography in the contemporary world: it accurately mirrors not the way things work, but our thunderstruck incapacity to comprehend the total world system.
# The Essential Element: an Interview with Edward Burtynsky Michael Torosian

It’s an organic architecture created by our pursuit of raw materials. […] The concept of the landscape as architecture has become, for me, an act of imagination […]

When I first started out in photography I used the camerato explore the world, responding to what I found. Photographing quarries was a deliberate act of trying to find something in the world that would match the kinds of forms in my imagination. I went in search of it, and when I had it on my ground glass, I knew that I had arrived.

In [dimensional] quarries we have to draw the substance out in a certain pattern, with a certain order

References

documentary adaptation

2006 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufactured_Landscapes
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 # predecessors Innes the lackawanna valley Watkins Although Burtynsky insists that it is not his intention to make political images, his work is frequently interpreted as an indictment of industry. As a photographer, he may be drawn to a particular landscape for aesthetic reasons, for its vastness or its coloration. But while it may be an artistic impulse that leads him to document these huge panoramas outside of our normal range of experience, there is something unsettling, even alarming, about scenes that show such massive human incursion into the earth. Thus it seems almost inevitable that they should take on a moral significance, that they should be seen as an illustration of our gargantuan appetite for raw materials. 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