Edward Burtynsky’s The Great Acceleration published by Steidl accompanies the exhibition of that name at the International Center of Photography in New York until 28 September 2025. His work needs no introduction but it raises the question of tense in his photography. The notion of a moment of past time captured forever – the camera which for Roland Barthes ‘mechanically repeats what can never be repeated existentially’ (Camera Lucida) – is patently true and it has become a cliché but Burtynsky does not operate with the preterite. What he shows is not the simple, finite past because he is depicting what is constantly and continuously taking place. The imperfect tense, however, cannot convey a vital aspect of what he shows, namely that the ecological crisis cannot continue, cannot endure, and here the use of any tense, any analogy with language, breaks down. Environmental degradation is progressing at such a pace – hence the title of his latest collection – that the road being travelled is a cul-de-sac. Scientists agree that a period of climate and ecological breakdown is imminent and Burtynsky’s photographs are testimony to this but he has not – cannot – established a new school of photography when the prospect of biodiversity loss and rising greenhouse gas emissions is at a catastrophic level; extinction does not allow for successors, only rebellion.. His photographs register intentional changes in landscapes that are totalizing, manufacturing a new cartography inimical to civilized life.
The scalar status of Burtynsky’s wide-angled, panoramic photographs of non-bucolic landscapes have so indisputably established his unique signature as to evoke Harold Rosenberg’s definition: ‘An artist is a person who has invented an artist’. Someone attempting to do something similar risks suspicion as a purveyor of forgeries and this makes it all the more important to establish the nature of Burtynsky’s achievement. Despite the environmental subject matter, what is supremely important about his work is craft, method and process, not admonishment or enlightenment.
His shots are characteristically taken some distance away from their subject matter and aerial ones, sometimes taken from a helicopter far above the ground, attain astonishing levels of resolution, surpassing satellite imagery of the Google kind. The photos are the work of a supreme technician, el máximo, and it occasions an aesthetic difficulty that cannot be glossed over with accompanying talk of sustainability and related environmental buzz words.
The problem is touched on, inadequately, in David Campany’s introduction to The Great Acceleration. The physical distance between camera and subject matter that Burtynsky transcends with ultra-sophisticated digital cameras and lenses finds an analogue in an emotional distance and a bracketing off of the needs of those affected by what is being photographed. There is a disengagement that registers uncomfortably, like the seagulls’ views of Bodega Bay in The Birds. Unlike the non-human agency evoked by Hitchcock, however, the unseen, malevolent presence in Burtynsky’s despoiled landscapes is that of human intervention. Campany defends his photography by claiming that the depictions being rendered ‘require a certain distance, even the suspension of opinion and emotion’ but this will not cut it when the photographs arouse an affective response that makes them as desirable as a glossy, consumerist item ( a ‘sublime object of ideology’ as Žiźek might put it). Unnatural geomorphic forms, purely the result of geocultural industrial and environmental ruination, become alluringly abstract in appearance. An open-pit copper mine in British Columbia becomes mandala-like; a potash mine in Russia creates picturesque giant seashell-patterns on the earth; marble quarries in Carrara, Italy, conjure up the remains of a long-abandoned monastery in Tibet. Possessing their own kind of non-pictorial beauty, such images could be sought after to decorate a wall in a designer home or in the foyer of a multinational corporation as evidence of its green credentials. The photographs tell a certain kind of truth by creating a truth, their job is not to criticize but to be and, at worst, this makes for an inverse relationship between aesthetic pleasure and political potency, between their abstract expressionism and the imperative call to act in the face of a global emergency.
To be fair, there are other kinds of images in The Great Acceleration – shipbreaking scenes, food processing and manufacturing plants, piles of discarded tyres and telephones – but they lack the inimitable Burtynsky watermark. What will be remembered are ones like that of a river dyed crimson from the leftovers of a nickel extraction plant, its snaking course suggesting a rich vein of something precious and life-giving amidst desolate land. Photographed at dusk, the luminescent river is surrounded by dark land and the contrast is as bewitching as a sunset on a vast African plain. The end of the world as we know it will bring some great views to contemplate: our visual and, in the philosophical sense, our virtual swansong.
Sean Sheehan
Edward Burtynsky: The Great Acceleration
Steidl
Text by David Campany and edited by David Campany
Extent: 136 pp
Illustrations: 80
Size: 30.5 x 23.5 cm
ISBN: 978-3-96999-481-8
£45.00
https://steidl.de/Books/The-Great-Acceleration-1133374258.html
