Burtynsky's Environmental Photography Reaction Paper

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Ed Burtynsky

My immediate response to Burtynsky's work was to think that the artist had managed to find a relevant aesthetic response to the most serious issue of the twenty-first century, which is climate change. The difficulty with climate change is that it does not lend itself easily to artistic representation or commentary: any small child knows that slowly and painstakingly building up a castle made of Legos is not as exciting as destroying a Lego castle. Ecology can seem tedious and destruction can seem fun. Burtynsky's work sidesteps this difficulty because in some sense he is documenting the destruction.

This does not mean Burtynsky's work feels message-driven. In photographic work documenting the large-scale changes that human beings make on their physical environment, such as "Mines," "Quarries," and "Railcuts" (all of which are large enough to be actual geological phenomenon but are in fact manmade, and each of which is documented in a separate photographic series) Burtynsky is showing, rather than telling. His work does not preach a save-the-planet message but instead allows the viewer to infer the presence of human activities behind these panoramic views of "un-natural" landscapes. I use the word "un-natural" because Burtynsky's work first meets the eye as standard nature photography -- a sort of Ansel Adams in Technicolor -- until the viewer realizes that these are not "natural" scenes but scenes of man-made disruption.

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Burtynsky's work appeals to me for its relevance. We live in an era when climate change is happening fast due to human activity, while humans are not responding quickly enough for a crisis of such magnitude. While other art forms may attempt to capture an environmental theme -- plenty of Hollywood films have an obvious ecological message -- photographs like Burtynsky's do not manipulate an audience like a movie does. His pictures merely provide evidence, and let the audience draw their own sober conclusions. In some sense, the major work of aesthetic ordering and organization in Burtynsky's work is not the photography itself but the man-made structures and scenes that he depicts -- this problematizes our category of "the aesthetic" insofar as many of these devastated scenes have their own haunting and desolate beauty, and clearly that is part of Burtynsky's point.

2. Burtynsky's series "China" depicts the environmental and landscape changes caused by large-scale human development projects during China's ongoing economic boom. For example, Burtynsky's photograph "Feng Jie #3" from….....

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