Burtynsky’s landscapes mediate supply chains selfies render invisible

Evidence

Radically more than an arm’s length away, the extreme vantage that has become the signature of Canadian gold miner and factory-worker-turned-artist Edward Burtynsky obverts the myriad reductions of photography in Kardashian’s successful, compelling antiart. In five-by-eight-foot high-gloss “manufactured landscapes” that almost never depict human subjects, at a supersize utterly resistant to iPhone circulation—the opposite of selfies in every dimension—Burtynsky’s works study systems and industries like oil drilling, automobile superhighways, copper mining, and waste processing, striving to encompass the banal infrastructure of catastrophic slow violence. Where selfie machines are in everyone’s pocket, the tech substrate of Burtynsky’s art is rarer: helicopters, drones, the industrial sites themselves, photo-paper writers rather than enlargers. While selfies frequently look directly into the camera, positioning the spectator to hold the subject’s gaze, panoramas often cannot direct the spectator’s focus: there is so much land and nowhere to land; it’s impossible to know your angle. Selfies exude the authentic charisma of their agent’s presence, but these scapes expose the produced presence of even nature itself, man-made industrial strength. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 331

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Concerns infrastructure, extraction, and slow violence rendered visible — tangent to the trees-as-infrastructure article’s interest in material systems underpinning culture.