An Artist in Awe of His Surroundings
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Peter Pettus recently reviewed Charles Mann’s “1491,” a book about America before Columbus, in these pages. Mr. Pettus wrote,”[W]hat the Indians actually did ‘on the earth’ was to mold it, modify it, cultivate it, burn out the underbrush, clear it, change the composition of the plant material and the soil to suit their needs, and generally dominate the landscape … to an unimaginable degree.” It is important to remember this when viewing “Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky” at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Mr. Burtynsky is not an environmentalist tut-tutting the despoliation of nature, but an artist in awe of what he sees.
Mr. Burtynsky, a Canadian, has spent the last 25 years traveling around Canada, the United States, and more recently Asia, photographing industrial sites with a large-format camera. His pictures are printed with deeply saturated colors in sizes up to 40 inches by 80 inches, and sometimes he takes two pictures side by side and prints them on two 48-by-60-inch sheets that together are 10 feet wide. The projects represented in the Brooklyn exhibition include “Railcuts,” “Mines and Tailings,” “Quarries,” “Urban Mines,” “Oil Fields and Refineries,” and “Shipbreaking.” (The Brooklyn Museum also has a generous selection of the photos featured in the concurrent “Edward Burtynsky: China” exhibition at the Charles Cowles Gallery in Chelsea.) The names do not suggest the great beauty of the images Mr. Burtynsky creates at these seemingly unlovely sites.
The three key components of Mr. Burtynsky’s art are point of view, size, and color, and he is a master of each. Consider “Railcuts #4, C.N. Track, Thompson River, British Columbia” (1985). At first sight, this is an indistinguishable mass of pale tans shading to dark browns. It seems to be a geological formation, but is it the bottom of something we are looking down on from above, or is it the side of something we are looking across at? And how big is it? The straight dark line running across the image about one-fifth of the way up helps to orient us: It is a railroad track, so the site has to be the side of a mountain. And the tiny telephone poles that run along the track help to establish the scale: big. The point of view Mr. Burtynsky chose for this picture initially destabilizes it almost comically, but once we know where we are, the vastness of the landscape is a revelation.
Mr. Burtynsky learned the importance of point of view from studying the work of Carleton Watkins, the great 19th-century photographer of the open spaces of the American West, and of the first introduction of industrial civilization into it. Having the right point of view is as decisive for Mr. Burtynsky as having the right moment is decisive for a street photographer, since the former’s art is primarily spatial while the latter’s is crucially temporal. One senses that even in this enormous landscape, moving the camera just slightly to the right or the left would cause the carefully composed image to lose its cohesion. The orderly railroad track does not violate the “wilderness,” but helps to define it: Mr. Burtynsky understands that the Canadian National Railway made his country possible.
I have frequently complained about pictures that are too big, in which size is a substitute for content, but that is never the case with Mr. Burtynsky. There is something of interest in every square inch of his works. In “Oxford Tire Pile #1, Westley, California” (1999), the viewer takes pleasure in making out separately each of the tires in a pile that extends far away – and seems in part about to topple over. “Densified Oil Filters #1, Hamilton, Ontario” (1997) is another case in point: You do a dance in front of the picture, first standing back to get an overall sense of it, then coming forward to study the details, then standing back again to integrate the details into the whole. These steps may be repeated several times. Being able to distinguish the minute particular from the random mass provides much of the same delight that children have with the “Where’s Waldo?” books.
Even in his pictures of discarded materials, Mr. Burtynsky does not seem to be decrying waste. The piles of tires are mostly neat. The oil filters, tin cans, oil drums, and scrap metal have been compacted; the jumbled telephones have been carefully segregated from other items, which suggests they are being stored for future use. Mr. Burtynsky grew up in a working-class town, and his father – with whom he was close – worked at the General Motors plant on the production line. He respects men who make things, but he knows there are consequences. If there is anything as crude as a “message” in his work, it is that our incredible prodigality can be managed.
Finally there is Mr. Burtynsky’s use of color. “Carrara Marble Quarries #24, Carrara, Italy” (1993) and “#25,” which adjoins it, are shot down into the quarry from a great height. The famous marble is several finely varied shades of white with some yellow stains to the right. A few strung wires add black lines. A diminutive tractor and tool shed are orange, yellow, and red. Other small bits of color are distributed as carefully as in an Abstract Expressionist painting, so that these quite large prints have a feel of great delicacy.
“Nickel Tailings #34, Sudbury, Ontario” (1996) and “#35” use color very differently. A rivulet of intense red flows through a barren black landscape, where only in a gray distance is there a stand of white birch on a low hill. Mr. Burtynsky usually shoots on overcast days when the light is evenly distributed; as a consequence, his pictures are built of color rather than of contrasting areas of dark shadow and intense light, but whether there are subtle variations of a limited palette or startling contrasts of bright colors, he is in control.
Peter Pettus’s review of “1491” continued, “In the Western Hemisphere, after the arrival of the Indians, there was no such thing as ‘wilderness.’ There is no ‘wilderness’ now, and there was none before.” Edward Burtynsky knows that in his bones.
“Manufactured Landscapes” at the Brooklyn Museum of Art until January 15 (200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, 718-638-5000).
“Edward Burtynsky: China” at the Charles Cowles Gallery until November 5 (537 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-741-8999).