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.

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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.

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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. Densified Oil Filters [.sup.#]1, Hamilton, Ontario (1997), for instance, could have been dreamt up by Jean-Paul Riopelle, Canada's great Abstract Expressionist painter. The tension between formal effect and knowledge of environmental degradation, however, seems somehow more whimsical than earlier work, and perhaps for that reason less felt. The hulking, rusting, metal skeletons in the recent shipbreaker series--this most recent project in the exhibit was inspired by a news item about the decommissioning of single-hull oil tankers ten years after the Exxon Valdez disaster--similarly recall, as Burtynsky himself admits, the modernist sculpture of Richard Serra. But these images are also the only ones in the exhibition with a strong human presence--workers stripping the hulls of the giant tankers grounded on the Bangladeshi tidal plain. The Shipbreaker series flirts openly with Salgado's Workers, and perhaps for that very reason denies the connection with straightforward leftist documentary most forcibly. Where the earlier landscape studies wore their references to past photography knowingly on their sleeves, and the tire graveyards dared us to refuse their beauty, the shipbreakers are deeply resistant to easy aesthetic or political interpretation.

In many respects, Burtynsky's work follows more directly from the tradition of landscape photography associated with the 1975 New Topographics exhibition. Like Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, and others, he is interested in detailed, almost detached, examinations of man-made environments. Intent on stripping away the photographic mystification of nature, injecting the trace of the human--but almost never the human body--back into the natural environment, such work seems intent on giving the lie to landscape as something outside us, pristine, untouchable. No doubt most post-New Topographics photographers seek a more profound recuperation of nature through the process, but it can just as easily become an exercise in pointed irony. Burtynsky's photographs are actually less jarring than Adams's vistas of suburbia set beneath the backdrop of the Rockies. With Burtynsky the ambiguities are deeper, harder to disentangle. Like much recent photography, his work plays on the advertising-based appeal of color photography, the indiscernible size and status of objects in large photographs, and the ever-growing difficulty in distinguishing between natural and man-made environments. The internal tension in Burtynsky's work thus emanates from differences in reading and interpretation rather than the sheer juxtaposition of, as the cliche would have it, man and nature.

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The sixteen other Canadian photographers that share the gallery with Burtynsky at the parallel Confluence exhibit help situate his work more precisely. Works by Jeff Wall, Lynne Cohen, Michael Snow, Raymonde April, Evergon, Angela Grauerholz, Kelly Wood, and others, all show family resemblances to Burtynsky's productions. The manipulations of scale and color, of historical reference, seriality, and a certain minimalist sensibility are on full display. Most striking is the remarkable convergence of concerns with landscape in the work of Burtynsky, Robert Bourdeau, Geoffrey James, and to a lesser extent Charles Gagnon. Bourdeau's relatively small, black and white photographs of American and French mining towns, for example, shows a sensitivity to the formal subtleties of site and to the possibilities of pictorial metaphor that Burtynsky seems to have emulated early on. James's work in Confluence comes from a series of images of Lethbridge, Alberta, that evokes both Adams's Colorado and, oddly enough, Atget's Paris. Significantly, both Burtynsky and James situate the meaning of their projects in the contrast and cross-reference of individual works, one with another. The process of reading photographs within series such as these inevitably hinges on a temporal interplay of images, references, and memories. Raymonde April's Tout Embrasser [Embracing All] (2000), a film of her personal still-photo archive, almost literalizes the process of transforming fixed images into a complex, quasi-narrative, and wholly temporal mode of artistic communication.

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In the end, the political ambiguity of Burtynsky's photographic image rests on exactly such a temporal hinge. Not only are the photographs internally divided between aspects, between aesthetic and intellectual readings, but their meaning resides in the fluctuating interplay of images. Burtynsky's wider project operates as a kind of non-naive realism--documenting and unveiling nodes within globalized systems of production and exchange that rarely, if ever, enter everyday consciousness. Viewed over time, however, the economical, and hence political, relationship between individual photographs of oil wells, oil refineries, discarded automobile tires, and beached oil tankers is inescapable. As with earlier photographers like Atget or August Sander, the critical power of each image builds and expands on those that precede it. The politics of any given image thus resides in its temporal expansion into the wider field of interpretation. And like these great modernists, Burtynsky's photography simultaneously slows the world down to a point of imagined ideological transparency and opens itself up to ambiguities and antinomies of knowledge, reflection, and history.

Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky,

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, January 31 - May 4, 2003.

Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 24 January - 4 April, 2004.

Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, 23 September - 11 December 2005.

Confluence: Contemporary Canadian Photography

Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa, January 31 - May 4, 2003.

MARNIN YOUNG is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. He is finishing a dissertation on the subjects of realism and time in nineteenth-century painting.