The guts of society are hidden away, but Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has spent his long career eviscerating them and putting them on display.
All the things that make modern life tick – the mines for our batteries, the farms for our food, the abattoirs for our meat – are kept secret, out of view because they lay bare the damage we’re doing to the planet. Burtynsky’s vast, mega-scale photographs here at the Saatchi Gallery (there’s a concurrent, free, smaller show of his work at Flowers Gallery too) drag those private shames out into the open. He photographs salt marshes carving up the Spanish coastline, gold mines spilling cyanide into the Johannesburg’s groundwater, circular crops sucking Saudi Arabia’s aquifers dry, diamond mines leaking toxic waste into the hills of South Africa.
It would make for grim viewing if it wasn’t all so beautiful. Burtynsky finds the sublime in the vile, he highlights the washes of hyper-saturated colour in criss-crossing striated hills and planes, the geometric composition of riverbeds and salt lakes. Everything is pushed to such an extreme – in size and colour – and so rich in aesthetic detail that it looks more abstract than anything real could ever be.
It’s not beautiful, it’s actually toxic and damaging and bad
And that’s his trick. The work lulls you into a state of awe at all the beauty of the world, and then big Ed runs in to bash you over the head with a baseball bat while yelling ‘wrong! It’s not beautiful, it’s actually toxic and damaging and bad! We’re killing the planet and you think that’s beautiful?!’ and you’re like ‘But why did you make it look beautiful then?? Jesus, I'm sorry, stop hitting me!’ as blood gushes from your head.
But he doesn’t stop. It’s room after room of bludgeoning you with evil gorgeousness. It’s a good trick, but it wears thin. The three-screen film installation is a bit throwaway, and his less abstracted images of factory workers and shipbreaking yards aren’t as good as similar work by other photographers (like Thomas Struth, Candida Hofer, Andreas Gursky). Somehow, it’s when he goes as abstract as possible that it feels the most real. By pushing things so far, his big beautiful photos of bad things allow the damage that humanity causes to blossom in your mind’s eye and grip you like terror. It’s all as shocking as it is sad, as awful as it is pretty, and as abstract as it is terrifyingly real.