";s:4:"text";s:6404:" Our achievements became a source of infinite possibilities. “Men, coated in oil, were breaking down the largest vessels ever built, with nothing more sophisticated than a cutting torch. Emphasizing these pictorial concerns within the landscape tradition was for him another way to contribute to the field and to assert the relevance of painting to his photographic practice.From the beginning of his career, Burtynsky was attuned to the delicate balance that exists between humans and the environment. The track is visible near the bottom, but only just: most of the composition revels instead in the abstract patterns formed by the flank of the mountain.The hues of this rock face – russet, ochre and white, offset by the greys of the scree – provide swirls of colour, creating a painterly effect. I looked upon the shipbreaking as the ultimate in recycling, in this case of the largest vessels ever made. We need to put our human perspective into these images, and our presence is dwarfed by the spaces we’ve created. Shenyang Heavy Machinery Group, Tiexi District, Shenyang City, Liaoning Province, China, 2005Shift Change, Yuyuan Shoe Factory, Gaobu Town, Guangdong Province, China, 2004“My earliest understanding of deep time and our relationship to the geological history of the planet came from my passion for being in nature.Our planet has borne witness to five great extinction events, and these have been prompted by a variety of causes: a colossal meteor impact, massive volcanic eruptions, and oceanic cyanobacteria activity that generated a deadly toxicity in the atmosphere. They are the first landscapes in over thirty years Burtynsky took focussing specifically on pristine wilderness, instead of the imposition of human systems upon it. It turned out that most of the dismantling was happening in India and Bangladesh so that's where I went.”We've never stopped taking things from nature. Approximately seventy percent of all fresh water under our control is dedicated to this activity.Aquaculture provides a glimpse into this quickly growing and increasingly important food source. At least half a dozen workers die in the quarries every month and there have been more than 500 serious accidents in the past half decade. Their vigorous assault on the land reminds us of our own experience in the West more than a century before.The quarries of southeastern Portugal are often extremely deep. It would be a study of humanity and the skill it takes to dismantle these things. Salt Pans continues in this direction with Burtynsky exploring the subtle modulations of tone and compositional balance of the pans, and the calligraphic tracks from vehicles referencing scale and human activity. I began to think about oil itself: as both the source of energy that makes everything possible, and as a source of dread, for its ongoing endangerment of our habitat.In Burtynsky's images, it is the insatiable human appetite for the world's raw materials that is of primary interest. The skilled stone carvers seen working in image The story of this trade in China is very similar to that of its main rival, India. There is no focal point, but a flattening of space, with no part of the composition privileged over any other.
How long can we get away with it?”Right now, he is shooting a new film called The Anthropocene Project – the third in a trilogy of feature-length documentaries, following Manufactured Landscapes (2006) and Watermark (2013), which Burtynsky has made with the Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal.
