New Acquisition: Edward Burtynsky

Edward Burtynsky, Shipbreaking #12, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000, C-print.

Exhibition Wall Text

Henry Art Gallery: Mezzanine
February 18 – May 18, 2009

“I’m trying to be the mediator between the life you lead and the places that allow you to lead that life.” –Edward Burtynsky, 2003

Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is known for his large-scale photographs demonstrating how human intervention has indelibly marked our environment. Burtynsky draws influence from art movements like 19th-century landscape photography, Land Art, and luminist painting. He has produced photographic series in which he explored the impacts of the Three Gorges Dam project in China, the effects of mining runoff in New Brunswick and Ontario, and other signs of damage from excessive global consumption. In each of his projects Burtynsky investigates one region and its industry, revealing the environmental impacts of globalization and the extremes of man’s quest for natural resources. Although we are surrounded by consumer goods, we are profoundly detached from their sources. Burtynsky’s photographs seek to illuminate this disconnect.

“Rock of Ages” is the name of a major corporation that operates ten active quarries and five manufacturing and sawing operations, principally in Vermont and Quebec. Rock of Ages #14 pictures a cut out of a 500-million-year-old Vermont mountainside where limestone has been excavated. Burtynsky calls these quarries “inverted skyscrapers,” because their volumes take on architectonic shapes as they carve deep into the earth. Whereas the 19th-century landscape photographers Burtynsky admires would have relied on human figures to provide scale, this photographer has learned to suggest size by featuring the ladders and steps that gave workers access to the pits.

Burtynsky’s attention to detail and research-based practice informs his work. The photographer consults topographical maps before embarking on his trips. In advance of traveling to Bangladesh, he hired a tour operator to scout out the shipbreaking yards. Burtynsky asked him to “rent a boat, run along the whole beach, count the ships that were being dismantled, and take pictures of them all.” He also asked him to note the way the sun raked over the beach and the way the tide flowed. Shipbreaking #12 meticulously pictures an industrial graveyard reserved for dismantling decommissioned ships, washed ashore like beached whales, as well as the Bangladeshis whose backbreaking work it is to disassemble them.

Burtynsky’s photographs are at once beautiful and ominous; they prompt us to rethink our relationship to our precious land. He states, “ultimately, what I’m looking for are interesting places and moments to embody my poetic narrative of the transfigured landscape, the industrial supply line, and what that means in our life.”

Organized for the Henry by Curatorial Associate Misa Jeffereis.