Edward Burtynsky photographs the landscape of oil
I came across a really interesting site today (petapixel.com) which has some great TED video’s on it.
When I was in Patagonia several years ago, a couple (hi Mary & Chris) on my workshop kindly sent me a coffee table book of the works of Edward Burtynsky.
I’d never heard of him before, but his work I feel, is very compelling.
Photography should know no bounds. It’s easy to classify things into ‘landscape’, ‘portraiture’, etc, etc, but as one moves on through photography, we hear and learn about photographers who are doing astonishing things.
A few posts ago, I was discussing ‘voice’, that part of you which governs your style and how you move forward with your photography. Watching this vide of Burtynsky, it’s clear he has a very strong motivation for why he makes his images. He’s very defined. He’s not out there shooting coastal sea scapes (sorry, but this is perhaps a dig of mine at the countless web sites I see which just seem to feature water in every shot). He’s got direction and focus.
His images are pretty inspiring and they remind me that so long as you have a strong sense of what it is you want to do, the photography will flourish.
A couple of years ago, A film about Edward Burtynsky and his work was shown on TV. It was called “Manufactured Landscapes”. Much of it was shot in China and showed huge factories, vast computer component recovery yards and ship building.
The most memorable part for me, though, was the vast beach in Bangladesh where Old Oil Tankers are run aground and broken up by people using very basic equipment. It looked like some apocalyptic science fiction movie.
The film also shows Edward making his images in these places and shows the results. Definitely worth seeing. See IMDB for more information.
Comment by Norman Bews — 22 May, 2010 @ 11:52 am