The current edition of Canadian Art has an article highlighting Edward Burtynsky's most recent photo collection, aerial photos of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. For those who remember Burtynsky's earlier collection - Oil - released late last year, the contrast between the almost striking beauty of the photos and the shock of the situation they portray will be familiar.
While Canadian Art has included some of the photos from the collection in their article, I couldn't resist copying some of the more interesting images in a larger format than you can get at the magazine's website. My respects to one of Burtynsky's dealers, Nicholas Metevier Gallery in Toronto, for posting at least some of the images on their website.
"For 30 years, Burtynsky has made it his practice to record, in large colour prints, the human imprint on the natural world, photographing mines and quarries and railway cuts and, more recently, the impact of oil extraction and use around the world, from the freeways of Los Angeles to the shipbreaking deltas of Bangladesh and the oil fields of Alberta and Azerbaijan."
"Some of Burtynsky’s pictures from this day are aesthetic marvels, and I find myself thinking about the craggy lines of Clyfford Still, or Kandinsky’s nervous whiplash gestures and lustrous chromatic variations. You can’t help it; aesthetic pleasure is impossible to forestall, the context notwithstanding."
"The blue of the ocean, like Kandinsky’s, has a souped-up, unreal quality, like lapis lazuli, and a pilot would later tell us that this new colour showed up just a week ago, when the spraying of chemical dispersants, principally Corexit 9527 and 9500, commenced full-bore. The toxic qualities of Corexit has led to its banning in Britain, but here it’s full-tilt boogie. In Burtynsky’s pictures, the ocean looks like Sani-Flush."
"How was this different from what I had imagined, watching the TV news in Toronto, researching online and flipping through magazines on the flights south? First, it was clear that the spill’s impact on shore life had not, in late June, even begun to be felt. Virtually all the oil still hung offshore. Did people understand what was coming? How could they?
Second, the dispersant seemed to have moved the oil deeper underwater, where the skimmers and booms could no longer intercept it ....."
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