The next big thing

Edward Burtynsky captures a budding superpower in China.

By Glen Helfand

THE POWERFUL IRONY of Edward Burtynsky's large color photographs is that they are gorgeous. But if they are so in a visual sense, they aren't in terms of their subject matter. The Canadian artist has, for 20 years, photographed ravaged landscapes where grand acts of industrialization have resulted in spectacles of ecological destruction. In long, wide views, he shows us the results of oil fields, tire dumps, industrial ship graveyards, mines, and tapped-out quarries – places where the scale is so vas t that it dwarfs any human figure and can't help but inspire a sense of wonder. (All these were seen in a recent survey of his work, "Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky," at Stanford University's Cantor Art Center this summer.) Awe, and perhaps shock, are not inappropriate responses to the effects of industrialism.

Part of the appeal of Burtynsky's pictures is that they are epic, a kind of art photography version of Cinemascope. Embedded in them is a sense of adventure and of travel to places that few really see, that is, unless they operate earthmoving machinery there. He's probably scaled a few fences in his day, and gone on arduous treks like 19th-century photographers Carelton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge, who hiked into Yosemite Valley before it was etched with National Park hiking trails.

Burtynsky has traveled internationally to various sites to find his subject matter. In 2002 he went to China to photograph the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, a gargantuan project with extremely questionable ecological repercussions. Those excursions have led to Burtynsky's most recent images of China, shot in 2004 and 2005, which are currently on view at Robert Koch Gallery and will be published in a book this fall by Steidl.

The images continue to exhibit his mixture of aestheticized documentation. Hulking dry-docked ships rust on flat expanses of land. Shipbuild ing sites reveal the geometric skeletons of the giant vessels, and pyramids of coal on a darkened plain outside a steel factory. These pictures show us things that seemed like progress during the industrial revolution and at the dawn of the 20th century – much as sprouting skyscrapers heralded the rise of modernism – but now these sights embody the ambivalence of our age, as it has become clear that the capitalistic impulse that we abide requires a mass extraction of resources.

These pictures, like most of Burtynsky's oeuvre, seem placeless, miles removed from the context of social interaction and actual commerce – they could be anywhere in the global economy. (This kind of placelessness is also evident in works by such globe-trotting photographers as Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, and Doug Hall, who each take long views of contemporary landscapes.)

What marks a new development in the photographer's focus is the inclusion of people, specifically factory workers. The image on the postcard promoting the Koch show is a view of a chicken processing plant, a seemingly endless, sterile hangar filled with perhaps thousands of workers dressed in the uniform of hooded pink smocks and bright blue aprons. They attend to the fowl encased in red trays. Much of the appeal of this image stems from the attention to color – the pink initially reads as bubble gum, but as it recedes into a more abstra ct mass in the background, it takes on more visceral connotations of plucked chicken. In another picture, workers from the Cankun Factory in Xiamen, product unknown, gather in orderly groups outside the landscaped factory grounds wearing yellow shirts color-coded to match the buildings themselves and the little fences and flags that flank the labor force. The workers are calmly and orderly waiting – I imagine either for a message from the big boss, disembodied on the bullhorn, or to return to their stations after a regimented five-minute break.

Unlike the black-and-white images that usually read as political (think: Sebastião Salgado's harrowing images of diamond mines in South Africa), Burtynsky's photographs, with their rich shades, are downright lush. These pictures are as magnetic and disturbing as any, but Burtynsky doesn't seem as confident about the few that invoke a more cultural context – he seems more comfortable taking a distant view of a construction site, an exotic location that seems like outer space. The fact that Burtynsky uses this group of images to depict a nation, and a fast-blossoming superpower at that, makes them more specific and thereby less universal. We know that these are Chinese workers and that their identity has meaning in economic terms. Yet it's hard to know how to approach them. Should we feel concern about their working conditions or revel in the travelogue?

What makes Burtynsky's images so compelling is the way they so directly reflect the impossibility of reconciling the paradoxes of contemporary life, particularly in the power-shifting ennui of late capitalism, as our natural resources dwindle and sense of cultural malaise grows. We love our iPod Nanos but don't consider who actually constructs them, or the toxic substances that will undoubtedly leak into the groundwater once the next big consumer item comes along. Burtynsky shows us the steps along the way, and they're alluring, horrific, and timelessly urgent.

'Edward Burtynsky: China' runs through Oct. 29. Tues.-Sat., 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m., Robert Koch Gallery, 49 Geary, fifth floor, SF. (415) 421-0122.