>>REVIEW
CHINA’S INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Edward Burtynsky
Runs until February 25
Paul Kuhn Gallery
If Edward Burtynsky’s large-format photographs of China’s industrial revolution look familiar, it’s because they’re really photographs of our own history.
Burtynsky, a Toronto-based photographer, has garnered international attention for his photographs of wastelands taken at sites that extend from Carrara, Italy to California. The common denominator of all the pieces is the technical precision he’s used to execute them, and their strange beauty. How else can one explain photographs of copper mines and abandoned oil processing facilities being coveted as pieces of art, and hung on walls in public galleries and contained in private collections across the world?
In this exhibition, China’s Industrial Revolution, Burtynsky again pursues his theme with a vengeance. Lugging his view camera into China’s factories and shipyards, he witnesses the inner workings of Asia’s most powerful economy.
What we learn is that China – a nation of more than 1.3 billion people – has gargantuan factories where hundreds of workers toil away at repetitive and predictable tasks in order to satiate the growing appetites of a country that is now being touted in financial circles as one of the engines of the world’s economy.
Burtynsky’s images range from grotesque to sublime, but they all have the same message: "Stop it you idiots, you’re destroying the planet!"
The problem with such a sentiment is that the Chinese are only emulating what the most powerful countries in the West have been practising for the past two centuries. Industrial revolutions aren’t new, only our recent awakening to the fact that what keeps the global economy firing might not be in the best interests of the population that inhabits Earth.
Is Burtynsky’s photograph of the Deda chicken processing plant in Jilin Province – where more than 400,000 chickens are readied for hungry consumers each day – going to stop the Chinese from eating chicken? No. Does the photograph succeed as a surreal record that comments on this time of mass consumption and mechanization? Yes.
Again and again, Burtynsky hits us over the head with our own misdeeds. His photograph of the Nanpu Bridge Interchange is an elegantly composed image that tricks the viewer into esthetically appreciating the ugliness of a massive roadway in the middle of Shanghai.
And that is the very conundrum that these photographs create. Not particularly great works of art, Burtynsky’s careful documentation of the destruction of our planet succeeds because this social activist, armed with a large-format camera, places all of us at the scene of the crime. View these photographs and appreciate their careful composition, detailed resolution and range of colour. Then step back and think about how what is being presented as art is, in fact, the story of how we’re killing our planet.
The Burtynsky exhibition is part of Exposure 2006 – The Banff-Calgary Month of Photography. For more information about exhibitions and venues, go to www.whyte.org/exposure2006.htm. |
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