This afternoon I saw the new Edward Burtynsky exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery here in Washington DC. This is a very memorable exhibit and I'm reminded once again how lucky we are to have the Corcoran and Paul Roth working to bring large-scale contemporary photography exhibits to DC.
The exhibit consists of about 55 landscapes, most of them very large prints (four feet or more on a side). Many are aerial shots (taken from a helicopter) and these are hung fairly low so the viewer can really "step into" the image and float above the landscapes.
The theme of the exhibit is oil, from its extraction and refinement to its use, its effect on our built environment and culture, and its eventual residue in the form of waste products and derelict infrastructure. The theme is strong enough that even someone with no interest in photography would enjoy the exhibit; it would make a great introduction to one kind of contemporary photography.
Although the theme is potentially political, Burtynsky produces images with no visible sense of irony, condescension, or call to action. This is not to say that the images are purely "documentary"; rather, they convey the photographer's sense of awe at the sheer scale of both grandeur and folly found in these human-made industrial and urban landscapes. I get the sense that Burtynsky would approach an aerial photo of an oil refinery vs. Niagara Falls -- or of a school of fish vs. a trash heap -- with much the same reverence and attention to detail.
The exhibit shows the power of large format photography to "make real" information that we know as statistics (so many billion barrels of oil, etc.) but can't really grasp. It reminded me a bit of Chris Jordan's use of large photorealistic images to convey large numbers. But the longer I look at Burtynsky's photos, the more the scale and repetitive detail (of both the human artifacts represented and the photos themselves) overwhelms my comprehension and leaves me feeling like I'm looking at a natural force.
In the end, I can no more really comprehend what's going on here than I can comprehend leaves in a forest or grains of sand on a beach. At a certain scale -- at the scale of these landscapes -- the human-made, no matter how repulsive, starts to look organic again. A quarry in the foreground mirrors a mountain in the background, with an encrustation of subarban houses between them.
There's also much to see and admire in terms of technique in Burtynsky's photos. For example, the aerial photos show slightly selective focus that pops out the crisper foreground, lets the every-so-slightly-more-blurred background recede, and adds enormously to the depth of the images. In other shots the focus is perfectly even, as in a landscape of discarded tires that seems to rise up to swamp the viewer (even though it is actually receding) because the most distant tires are as sharp as the closest. In some shots the desert is so beautifully lit and exposed that one can almost ignore that it's infested with oil pumps; in another shot the sea and sky are so similar in tone that an oil platform almost floats in mid-air.
I would call it a must-see. But if you can't make it by December 13, these images are also available in Burtynsky's latest book, not yet release on Amazon but available in the Corcoran bookstore along with several of his other books (including Manufactured Landscapes).
Exhibit details
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