The photographer
Edward Burtynsky is obsessed with oil. For years, he has recorded its
extraction, use and impact on our planet, travelling to fields in Azerbaijan,
taking shots of cars on the Nanpu Bridge Interchange in Shanghai, or visiting
tyre mountains in California.
The work was
collected in a fabulous coffee-table book in 2009 but, such is the enduring
power of these images, that they continue to be shown in exhibitions around the
world: one has just opened in London and another starts next month in Reno,
Nevada. There's also a new Burtynsky: Oil app, a flick book of work that seeks
to understand our reliance on the most important of natural resources.
"Everything we
consume comes from nature in some way," he says. "And it's not only
where it comes from that interests me, but how it is used and where it
goes." This is why Burtynsky ended up in Bangladesh for some of his most
famous images, of decommissioned oil tankers. Here, he talks The National
through three favourite shots from the Shipbreaking series.
Shipbreaking
#11
"Although
these great vistas of broken ships are incredibly dramatic, I wanted to try and
capture some of the humanity of Chittagong, too.
"There were
25,000 men here doing back-breaking, dangerous tasks. I wasn't first to point this
out, but first world ships were going to the developing world to be taken apart
in an environment that would never be allowed in the first world.
"These images
I think allowed people to look at this industry and think about the
relationship between us and the people breaking these ships. We are all
implicated in that world - I was certain that when I was photographing these
tankers, some of the oil they had transported had found its way into the car
that I had driven, or the plane I had flown in."
Shipbreaking
#13
"Chittagong
was a strange, surreal, almost incomprehensible place. It felt like a
post-apocalyptic setting.
"The smoke
blowing in from the shipbreaking work taking place off-shot, combined with the
natural haze of the equator at sunset and the lack of a horizon line, meant it
became this mysterious, ethereal space. I like it when images have the capacity
to transcend and enter the imagination as these epic, mythic places where these
events are taking place. If I'm capturing the active side of an industry, I'll
typically also focus on where the waste of that industry is gathered, too. To
me, this landscape felt like contemporary ruins, a part of our society that
we've used and turned our backs on."
Shipbreaking
#23
"In this shot,
you're looking at an inside wall of a huge tank on a ship which would contain
the oil.
"So to have a
solitary man standing against it seemed incredibly powerful. He became, for me,
an interesting representative of the workforce; you could see he was doing a
hellish job, but he'd retained a kind of dignity.
"He was
standing proud and presenting himself to the camera in a way that suggested to
me that he wanted to be acknowledged for the work that he was doing - even
though he was so poor he didn't have any shoes. I didn't ask him to stand in a
deliberate way, and I certainly don't like to editorialise - I'm not telling
people what's good or bad. I really just want images such as this to prompt
people to grapple with the complexity of the world we live in."
Burtynsky: Oil is
at The Photographers' Gallery, London until July 1, and the Nevada Museum of
Art, Reno, from Saturday to September 23.
Source: The
National. By Ben East. 5 June 2012
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