Enlightened Librarian: Edward Burtynsky's amoral eye

Edward Burtynsky's amoral eye · 27 November 2006

Do see, if you have a chance, the excellent documentary by Jennifer Baichwal, Manufactured Landscapes, which animates and contexualizes Edward Burtynsky’s large-scale photgraphs of blasted industrial sites, sprawling junkyards and other expressions of the contemporary sublime.

Burtynsky is the country’s most successful fine art photographer, having made a career of going to unhealthy places and showing that—if the light is right—strip mines, tire piles and dismantled ships are beautiful to behold. His images are free of dogma, and just as controversial for taking no overt stand against environmental degradation. What he does, he says, is show us how we have changed the landscape, and let us decide whether the beauty of the image outweighs the horror of what has been done.

The film follows Burtynsky and his entourage to China, where he trains his large-format camera on places that open a space for awe in the brain: factory-cities devoted to the production of irons and circuit breakers; a horizon of coal slag; the almost laughably immense Three Gorges Dam.

Burtynsky is an abstractionist, not a socialist—although one of the film’s great strengths are its moments of zooming in close on a few individuals in the maelstrom of forms. What I’ve been missing so far in accounts of the explosion of the Chinese economy is a sense of scale both large and small. The film’s opening scene is a stunning tracking shot along the shop floor of a factory several football fields long, where, vaguely, electric motors and other things are being assembled on row after row of workbenches where hundreds of people sit calmly and complete their tasks. At another point, the camera focuses on the hands of one assembling circuit breakers with immense dexterity and speed, with the worker herself noting that she can assemble 400 of these every day “without overtime.” The film complete Burtynsky’s goal of opening a fissure of new perception.

What have we done?

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