Hats Off to Burtynsky

Silver Lake Operations #1, Lake Lefroy,
Western Australia, 2007 © Edward Burtynsky

On Friday afternoon, my wife and I went mooching around Fremantle. The Maritime Museum and some FotoFreo exhibitions were our two chief destinations; neither disappointed.

A standout was the exhibition Australian Minescapes, by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky.

To paraphrase Burtynsky, his work looks at how we (aka humans) modify natural landscapes to extract the raw materials we use to make the stuff of modern life -- i.e. cars, fridges, houses, factories and, probably, the seat you're sitting on. By natural landscapes, Burtynsky isn't on about the holes in the ground we plant veggies in; as the photo above shows, he's on about Grand-Canyon-like chasms--and shifting entire towns--to get minerals out of the ground.

Burtynsky's photos have a painterly quality, as though he's layered oils on a canvas; the thicker 'layers' are like nodules and ridges. I wanted to touch them. Yet, of course, this 3D-effect is an illusion: he is a photographer not a painter.

The scale of the photos is breathtaking, as though entire skies and pockets of Western Australian earth are stuffed into single photographs. In a triptych of the Super Pit mine in Kalgoorlie, each haulpack is about the size of half a thumb-drive.

If you're in Perth and can get to the Maritime Museum (where the exhibition is showing) before 4th June, do so. You'll be amazed.