Manufactured Landscapes

Edward Burtynsky makes images of hidden landscapes. They are landscapes that are as divorced from our everyday experience as the remote wilderness areas that inhabit the framed confines of other landscape photographers. Some of them are as compellingly beautiful, even sublime, as the best of the wilderness genre.

The traditional wilderness landscape connects to our lives, if at all, as a testament to qualities in the natural world that astound us as utterly beyond and outside human creative imagination, let alone human capabilities. It is in that way that they enrich us and our imaginations. They are the work of forces and processes operating on a creative scale in space and time that transcends individual humans and even the human species. We recognize in them the antithesis of human artifice, which can and has often transformed this kind of landscape into something entirely different, and with stunning suddenness. In a fraction of the engendering time — something of enormous complexity and richness becomes far simpler, far less rich as it is reigned in by the limits of human imagination. We treasure the beauty of natural landscapes all the more because we are at least vaguely aware of their fragility — their susceptibility to being almost instantly and irreversibly transformed by even modest, well-intentioned human presence and "use".

Burtynsky's landscapes connect to our modern lives in some very different ways. They are, as he says, "manufactured landscapes". There's a pun in that phrase. His are the landscapes that we make in order to make things ... and eventually discard them. Like natural landscapes, they are created and shaped by forces and processes without teleological guidance. But with manufactured landscapes, the processes and forces at work are not entirely disinterested. They are ones that spring from the urge to satisfy specifically human material desires. Manufactured landscapes are literally sculpted by the economic engines that bring the objects of our desires into our life. While wilderness vanish, manufactured landscapes expand and increase in number — as human desires and the number of desiring humans increase.

Wilderness landscapes are the result of terribly enormous and complex forces -- shifting tectonic plates, vulcanism, visits by comets, meteorites and interstellar dust, huge shifts in tropospheric and oceanic patterns, and the interaction of all of these with the 100's of millions of different organisms that have inhabited earth since the first billion of its 4.5 billion year history. The forces of the economy, though a human invention and institution, are no less terrible — perhaps even more so. They are global in spatial scale. The time scale on which they act and perform transformations can be virtually instantaneous — literally, before anyone can understand what the changes mean. And the changes cannot be undone.

In front of Burtynksy's lens, manufactured landscapes have a beauty that haunts. Wilderness images haunt us at least partly by confronting us with what billions of years of creative energy have wrought without any human guidance. We feel awe, perhaps more so with the realization of the stunningly rapid disappearance and painful rarity of the subject. With manufactured landscapes, we are haunted by the prospect of their rapid incursion into our life and the realization that in the seemingly mundane details of how we live our daily life, we are the driving force behind this advance. Soon, inevitably, these manufactured landscapes won't be hidden. The formal beauty that Burtynsky achieves does, as it should, strike terror into us. The seductiveness of the images is metaphorically laden with the seductiveness of the things that are the objects of human desire — the things whose making and discarding unleash the seemingly inexorable economic forces that mold his landscapes.

Modest reflection on what's just outside the frame of Burtynsky's images deepens the feeling of looming specters. While many of us fuel the economic sculptor of manufactured landscapes by "expressing" our consumptive preferences, granite quarry workers breath granite dust and quartz; eWaste sorters wade unprotected through piles of electronic components and other electronic components laden with cadmium lead, mercury, and PCB's; shipbreakers in 40º C heat, wade in neck-deep crude oil, tear apart ship parts laced with asbestos, PCB's, lead, mercury, organic solvent, and crawl unprotected and armed with crude blow-torches, grinders, and cutting tools up, over, and around rust-weakened hulks. These people, we may surmise, are part of the landscape because it makes "economic sense".

Wilderness landscapes disappear; manufactured landscapes emerge and expand. Photographic inspection and reflection follows, leaving us with these stunning juxtapositions of images of Ansel Adams / Burtynsky:


Bridalveil Fall / Oxford Tire Pile


Frozen Lake and Cliffs / Rock of Ages #4


Monolith / Rock of Ages #15


Canyon de Chelly / Shipbreaking No. 9a


Aspens / Uranium Tailings No. 12


Snake River / Nickel Tailings No. 34

For some time still, the richest among us will be able to escape from the sight of Burtynsky's hidden, albeit increasingly exposed and apparent, manufactured landscapes. But even now, not even the richest can escape their collusion and implicit responsibility in creating these landscapes, or in making them increasingly dominant on the planet.

Burtynsky's books include his "Manufactured Landscapes" (http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300099430), "Quarries" (http://www.steidlville.com/books/555-Quarries.html), and "China" (http://www.steidlville.com/books/134-China.html). Helioskiagrablog urgently recommends the 2006 documentary film, "Manufactured Landscapes" (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/manufactured_landscapes/). Despite its limitations, the film begins to suggest a central point of this post: Byrtynsky's images are not so much about isolated places, as much as they are about the power of the human institutions that create and connect them.