The Brooklyn Rail

The Great Acceleration, Edward Burtynsky’s solo exhibition currently on view at ICP, draws together over eighty photographs made over more than forty years. On the museum’s second floor, an array of unusually large prints shows landscapes radically altered by industrialized human activity.

The photographs are pictorially compelling. Their scale and often lyrical composition invite extended examination to identify the objects that make for such engaging patterns. Burtynsky has technical mastery that few photographers achieve, and seen from a distance, the images have stunning clarity that holds up even when viewed close. Many were made with an 8x10 format camera—a cumbersome setup requiring a tripod and bulky film holders. This slow, deliberative process, now rare in the age of digital cameras and phones, yields photographs of striking definition and detail.

Burtynsky’s images are not only technically flawless; they consistently demonstrate a strong formal structure. Even the smaller prints on the third floor hold their own. Though they lack the spectacle of the large-scale works, they are no less potent. Early in Burtynsky’s career, prints were typically made at this more modest scale, and even then they were unforgettable—like Nickel Tailings #34, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada (1996), a diptych that seems to show a river snaking across two panels, the water an unnaturally vivid orange. Seeing these works again at ICP, now printed at much larger scale, heightens their formal clarity and brings out the texture of the surrounding soil. At this size, the abstraction in Burtynsky’s photographs becomes more pronounced: industrial patterns sweep across the surface like elements in a vast gestural painting.

I mentioned this particular work to Marc Mayer, who is currently writing a biography of Burtynsky, and I was astonished when he told me that “the red rivers aren’t water but nickel mining effluent headed to tailings ponds. They are actually tiny, so an illusion.” These kinds of displacements—of scale, perspective, or abstraction—are among the qualities I find most compelling in Burtynsky’s oeuvre.

Documentary photography, whether journalistic or artistic, is subject-driven. A photographer may devote a project or a lifetime to the examination of similar subjects, events, or themes. Depending on the importance, drama, or intrinsic interest of the subject matter, such photographs can be compelling simply by recording what there is to be seen. Burtynsky’s chosen subjects are like this, dramatic in scale and freighted with the existential consequences of the “rise of human impact on our planet.” His material could be examined effectively in competently made photographs with accompanying text, ably fulfilling a pedagogical intent.

The difference is that Burtynsky’s photographs reveal a distinct way of seeing. His subjects are colossal, as are his images. Subject and picture coalesce into works that unmistakably reflect the sensibilities of their maker. The theme of environmental degradation has been documented in countless photographs—many of the same sites Burtynsky has visited have been photographed before. But few others show the consistency of vision or the formal power of this artist’s work.

Uralkali Potash Mine #4, Berezniki, Russia (2017)—an image I remember having seen previously in a gallery show—remains a favorite. Made deep within the cavern of a mineshaft, the photograph captures bands of gray, pink, and white striated rock, richly patterned and almost otherworldly. Cutting across these sedimentary formations are corrugated grooves carved by massive industrial drilling bits, adding a visual counterpoint of mechanical repetition. I’m not the first to associate the shape of ammonite fossils with this image. The resemblance is striking.

Shipbreaking #49, Chittagong, Bangladesh (2001) is an image that is at once descriptive and transformative. It depicts a gutted commercial ship resting on a muddy tidal flat, flanked in the distance by two intact vessels awaiting the same fate. The photograph reveals how obsolete ships are dismantled for scrap—their steel sliced apart and recycled—yet it also transcends documentation. The central form, a rusted bulkhead shown in elevation, takes on a monumental presence, evoking Richard Serra’s early Cor-Ten steel works: flat slabs of oxidized metal driven into the earth. Possibly taken at dusk, the image is suffused with warm rust tones and softened light. The bleached colors and the quietude of the scene recall the empty expanses of seaside light in Joel Meyerowitz’s “Cape Light” photographs.

Pivot Irrigation #8, High Plains, Texas Panhandle, USA (2012) does what aerial photographs are known for: it offers a bird’s-eye view of the land below. Since we typically experience the world from ground level, we are naturally drawn to the unfamiliar geometries revealed from above. Still, some photographers—Emmet Gowin and David Maisel come to mind—have pushed the genre further, creating images that are both visually striking and compositionally refined. Pivot irrigation circles are an aerial photography trope; a quick image search turns up an abundance of similar views. Burtynsky’s photograph, however, is shot from directly overhead and divides the landscape into bold gray stripes on the right side of the frame and a single orange irrigation circle that occupies the upper portion of the left. The inconsistencies of texture across the surface lend the image a painterly quality and formal precision.

Throughout the history of photography, there have been practitioners whose images, though journalistic in nature, bear the unmistakable imprint of personal vision—think W. Eugene Smith or Sebastião Salgado. Burtynsky belongs in that pantheon.

Considering that the photographs of Smith and Salgado clearly depict hardship and struggle, it’s fair to ask whether Burtynsky’s aesthetics adequately support the polemic his work is often said to present. The photographs are potentially ambivalent: in many cases, the images alone do not explicitly convey environmental degradation, nor do they call for remediation. Some could plausibly appear in the annual reports of the very corporations whose operations Burtynsky photographed—images that, stripped of context, might even seem to justify or celebrate the scale of industrial activity. I don’t have a problem with that. As an admirer of his work, I’m not looking for a didactic message in the photographs. Maybe I’m whistling past the graveyard, but I’m satisfied by the fact that his work transcends mere description.