Shooting Wide Open

Edward Burtynsky

One criticism of Burtynsky is that his photos de-emphasize human beings in favor of aesthetic composition, and are too detached, too impersonal and unemotional. People are lost among the lines and clutter of industrial landscapes.

Are these people seeing the same photos I’m seeing? The photos contain almost nothing but the evidence of human activity, show the scope of human activity. If anything, they are overwhelmingly emotional. When I look at the China pictures, I can’t help but think about how incredibly capable we are, about the wonder of building these huge metal structures that have never before existed and that can do things never before done in the long pre-human history of the world. At the same time, of course, the consequences of our actions are implicit in the images – the profusion of toxic metals, the dangerous working conditions, and the displacement of people from their homes.

In a way, the criticism is true, since Burtynsky does not attempt to show the effects of toxic metal contact or workers injured on the job. But I think his choice to stand back and show the endeavor itself, the construction and the mess and the normal working environment absent individual tragedy, makes a larger statement, not about one particular issue but about our resource usage practices in general. Yes, people are mostly tiny insignificant specks in these photos, but that is the position most of us have chosen for ourselves, that is a consequence of our own doing.

We’ve reduced ourselves to inconsequentiality by shunning worthy causes – social justice, higher global standards of living – in favor of hoarding luxury goods and cheap mass-produced trinkets which give rise to severe pillaging of natural resources. Instead of figuring out how to best use our resources in a communal way and make them last, we’ve become fixated on ownership, on possessing something as an individual. We have chosen personal convenience over the greater good and have indeed become isolated specks in a vast barren landscape.

If we do in fact prefer more personal photography, images with a person upfront and center, looking at Burtynsky’s work is like zooming out for a view of the larger perspective which we’ve forgotten, of the global ecological issues we’ve neglected which now have gotten a way from us, slip beyond our control, are bigger than us, just as the Burtynsky landscapes engulf us.

At the risk of offending, to me this sort of criticism of this sort of work belies a fixation with beauty, aesthetics, personal taste, that supercedes consideration of the subject matter. It comes directly out of being trained to think that we are separate from nature. As a result, we don’t see how the state of the planet has a direct bearing on our lives. Granted, if judge Burtynsky’s photos solely by artistic, creative criteria, then maybe he’s not so original, but to me he falls squarely in on the documentary side of the line. That his work can also be exhibited as fine art is proof of how artfully they are executed.

And often this criticism is joined with the objection that Burtynsky glorifies and beautifies ugly, bad things like industrial waste, that he falls into a cliched category of photographers who are obsessed with ugly-beauty, who like to make bad photos of trash and call it art out of some anti-establishmentarian urge. Sure, there are some photos that make me feel this way, but it hardly applies to Burtynsky. In a discussion filmed as an extra on the DVD, he says that it’s not about beauty or ugliness. Rather, he works to find a visual language that is compelling, that draws people’s attention and makes them consider these industrial places, possibly in a different light.

A pile of tires or a dismantled ship is not in an of itself ugly or beautiful, and I suspect the general assumption that these things are ugly says plenty about the extent to which we do agree and acknowledge that environmental damage and the refuse from our industrial processes are unequivocally bad in a thoroughly apolitical way. This implicit understanding makes our inaction and apathy all the more unacceptable.

To me, the reasonable action following the achievement of decent standards of living is to spread it around til everyone’s got it, but instead, most of us seem to run on the desire to acquire a big house, two cars and an iPod for every family member, then acquire a bigger house, more luxurious cars and the newer version of the iPod. The vast majority of people want to make money but don’t realize their politics funnel money to the few. It really is like some sort of surreal apocalyptic distopian sci-fi story. And I have to say it: I detect something faintly apocalyptic in Burtynsky’s photos.

Sure, everyone pursues material wealth in the hope of making our lives and our families’ lives better, but we should know better. We’re indulging ourselves and there is plenty of rationallization involved. Are we really going to argue that our lives would be so much worse without the latest versions of five different electronic devices and new clothes every year?

Edward Burtynsky

Manufactured Landscapes, the film, is a good complement to Burtynsky’s stills, showing a closer perspective on the individuals, where the stills show humans ripping apart the landscape for natural resources.

In the extras, a real estate business woman shows the crew around the house in what’s basically the Chinese version of Cribs, complete with westernized teenager on her cellphone. It really hits home what China is now aspiring toward. In another extra scene, a bunch of people are crowded around a small table, rowdily enjoying a meal in a very Chinese way, with an incongruous shopping bag printed with a huge 3M logo on one of the seats beside them. That aspect of the film is missing from the stills. The connection to the West, the huge demand for consumer goods that drives this rapid development, is not directly obvious in the pictures.

I don’t like reading indictments of China in the press, citing human rights violations and politics, and not pointing out that this is a phase that the US also went through, that China is probably where the US was in the ’20s. I’m no historian, but off the top of my head – meatpacking industry, child labor in the textile factories, Tamany Hall, police corruption in LA in the ’50s, etc. Instead of acting as a guide as to what to what mistakes not to make, how to preserve natural resources, etc, the government just condemns China for all these things. Of course, it’s not in US interests to help a rising competitor, but I think that is a somewhat unhealthy capitalist mentality which focuses more on profits than creating a sustainable world community. And we all know where focusing on short term growth and wealth leads.

(Hello, financial crisis.)

Incidentally, following his 2005 TED prize, he donated photos to a sustainability site called WorldChanging.com, a magazine style site whose goal is to connect “people are working on tools for change” in different fields with each other. They recently published an article drawing parallels between the government and economists’ handling of the financial crisis to the government’s unwillingness to address climate change issues.

This crisis is a signal that we need to reassess what we value and what our long term goals are, not as individuals but as a society and a people. The accepted economic mantra of growth, growth, growth has been mirrored and in fact driven by our attitude toward and use of natural resources. (Bill McKibben wrote an interesting book on this topic called Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. Read it.) Corporations want to expand, the rich want to be richer, everyone wants more of this or that.

Burtynsky seems less interested in indictments and more in encouraging people to think of solutions. As a photographer, he doesn’t know what those are specifically, but photography can be a part of it. From the Treehugger interview (gee, maybe you should read it!):

Right now governments — especially in the West and in North America — are painfully lacking in guidance and policy to really assist in allowing people to make better choices. I do believe policy is an important component of the movement towards a more sustainable world.

None of us can work independently of each other. Corporations have to take social responsibility more seriously than they have in the past and begin to kind of reshape themselves to become more sustainable. And individuals have to look at their habits and reshape them to reconsider how it is that we’re using the resources of this world.

How [photographic] work ultimately ends up inspiring people to action — I’m not really sure that it on its own has the capacity to do that. I think there’s a growing concern, and a growing group of people who are I think prepared to really make changes.

When I looked in the history of photography, there are examples: Watkins and his photographs of the West — that was the preservation of Yellowstone and the National Park System grew out of that. You look at Lewis Hine and his work as a photographer in child labor, and child labor laws came into play with the photographs as evidence of the wrongdoing.

I think for a long time, certainly the latter part of the 20th century, the idea that photographs can help shape social change was kind of lost. But… images are shaping and being used as the iconographic representations of the issues that we now need to grapple with in our times.

~

UPDATE:

J.M. Colberg linked to this series of posts in his blog with some very kind words. To be honest, I’m a little stunned. The internet is so huge I don’t actually expect anyone to read this blog, much less than a blogger who I follow and admire! But I’m very glad someone got something out of this, and I wanted to briefly address a point that he brought up here since he doesn’t have comments on his blog. In response to what I say above about indictments of China, he writes:

While the latter certainly might be true, that doesn’t mean that we simply have to accept what’s going on, actually quite on the contrary. To take an extreme example, just because slavery was legal in the US in its early years, that doesn’t mean we now can’t tell anyone not to have slaves now.

I agree. Certainly it would be morally lax. However, the US government does not back its verbal statements with concrete action. Instead of refusing imports from sweatshops or creating economic or political incentives to promote free speech and democracy, there is only a profusion of indictments. Without the action, these verbal reproaches take on the flavor of… well, nagging. Which is fine, they are entitled to their opinion, but I don’t like it. I should disclose that I am in fact Chinese (and an American citizen), so this topic hits a bit close to home.

Frankly, the criticisms and indictments would sit well with me if the connection between western consumerism and Chinese development and sweatshops was emphasized. But it seems that the West would like to place the responsibilty for sweatshops and pollution from industry solely on China’s shoulders, as if the two nations’ actions were completely independent of each other, when in truth the West does shoulder part of the responsibility of creating the demand for goods in the first place.

The bulk of my frustration comes not from the protests themselves, which are valid, but from the fact that while these statements are made, consumers continue to take advantage of the cheap prices of Chinese goods, and corporations continue to salivate over the large target market. With human rights violations coming to light, the demand has not eased up significantly, so it seems the west is willing to say these things with its mouth but not its pocketbook.

Edward Burtynsky

Today I watched Manufacturing Landscapes (Youtube trailer), a documentary of Burtynsky at work in China. Aside from the film itself, the extras on the DVDs, especially the slideshow with commentary by Burtynsky, are wonderful. I learned that marble has a translucent quality and that Michaelangelo’s marble was taken from quarries with very highly translucent stone of top quality. I saw his quarry photos a year or so ago when the exhibition was in town, but didn’t dig any deeper since they are more abstract, pretty than his other work. I wasn’t very serious about photography then, but now that I’ve seen his other work, he is my new role model!

I get caught up in the small hassles of making a plan, of learning the technical side, and every once in a while I need a kick in the butt to remind me of what good, relevent photography really is. His photos are incredibly well composed and artful, but the subject matter – industrial landscapes – is ultimately what jumps out at you. Part of my strong reaction was because the film focused on China, sure. It’s heartbreaking, because I want my birth nation to be advanced, to be respected, to go forward, but at the same time, “progress” on this scale is certainly not sustainable.

Burtynsky makes a point of not making any sort of overt normative statement about his subject matter. He takes the approach of trusting the content in the images and letting others come to a voluntary understanding of the subject matter rather than ramming a political message down people’s throats. At the end of the film, he says:

There are times when I have thought about my work and putting it into a more politicized environment. If I said, “This is a terrible thing we’re doing to the planet” then people will either agree or disagree. By not saying what you should see that may allow them to look at something that they never looked at and to see their world a little differently. So I think many people today sit in that uncomfortable spot where we don’t necessarily want to give up what we have, but we realize what we’re doing is creating problems that run deep. It’s not a simple right or wrong.

And in a Treehugger interview, he says:

Once people start coming to their own conclusions from seeing a body of my work, and [begin] to sense the kind of import or weight of the consequence of those places that have been created to the service of industry and the capitalist culture, if they arrive on their own to these kinds of feelings that something is wrong here — I think that has a lot more potential to raise consciousness than being told, “You need to not do that.”

We don’t really react well being told how to behave. But if we arrive at that from understanding, that there is a consequence to our actions, and we arrive at those kind of conclusions in our own ways, I think we have a much greater chance of really shifting consciousness into a new realm of concerned citizen, and someone who wants to do the right thing for future generations.

What happens is that I think most people end up in the same place without me saying, “You should end up in that place.” I think the film does bring people to this kind of place… “Oh my God, look at the scale of industry in China!” And this is a direct result of the consumer culture that we’ve developed here in the West. It is this dance that we’re doing between China as a manufacturer and us as the consumer.

It’s an admirable stance, but very difficult for the more opinionated among us!

One reaction to this stance is that he is being cleverly political by claiming not to be political, but I believe his stance is sincere. He certainly has an opinion, but to me that doesn’t equate with political. That’s like saying the statement “breast cancer is bad” is political. Environmental damage is not a political issue where you take sides. It is unevoquivocally bad for everyone, and the only people who will try to convince you otherwise sit on the boards of rich rich corporations.

I believe what he means by apolitical is trying to stay away from making any sort of judgment about what China is doing. The content of the photos is not as declarative as people think. An inherent ambiguity in some of the images makes it difficult to say definitively what the picture ‘means’. The type of images which are sometimes used to illustrate some story about the robotic monotony of industrial workshops in developing countries can also be a point of pride to builders and those trying to pull themselves out of rural poverty.

What looks like an endless ravaged industrial wasteland to a westerner might be a testament to the engineering prowess and scope of the project to a Chinese person. In an audio interview he talks how proud some Chinese are about the Three Gorges Dam, which is so large that for the days in which they were filling it, there was a measurable wobble in the rotation of the Earth. Full-on capitalism may be the wrong choice for China for many reasons, but the endeavors of all these builders and workers are wrapped in personal stories of people trying to make a living and raising a family in a society trying to transform itself into the mirror image of another. This is not simply an impersonal environmental issue in the old sense of the phrase.