This incredible photographer (based in Toronto, Canada), completed a series with very vivid and colourful images that looked upon the great industrial landscape of oil refineries and facilities with a powerfully critical eye. This impressive project resonates completely with the message I intend to portray within my own work, albeit his imagery is both devastating and beautiful at the same time.
“[we] come from nature.…There is an importance to [having] a certain reverence for what nature is because we are connected to it... If we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves.”
His complete connection with nature and the awareness of our actions implies he is knowledgable about this subject, and the imagery certainly shows his knowledge through the beautiful photographs he creates. The desolation resonates so truly with a world we are hidden from. In the image below, the landscape is almost alien to us, where we would expect green fields and a bluish water running through it - yet we are presented with the opposite, a black landscape with bright red waters flowing though.
What a world we live in. The image above scares me, although in reality it holds little harm. This orangey-red deposit is the leftover of oxidation of iron whilst the nickel separation occurs. The image below shows a plethora of nodding donkey oil wells on the 'oil field' taken in Belridge, California, 2003. The very idea that we as a society must usurp our planet dry so that our landscapes hold little left in the form of oil or gas presents us with a world where we would need to come up with a solution that avoids using something of limited supply to fuel our energy-hungry world. In Burtynsky's oil images, it is the insatiable human hunger for the world's raw materials of which is primary interest to me. The tools of manufacturing are sometimes important, but they often function simply as a true measure of the immense scale of the scene before us.
The rest of the worlds I will leave in the hands of Edward Burtynsky himself, as they truly explain my feelings for such industrial behaviour. The origin and use of the materials has dawned upon me as something we must all be concerned about, not just photographers. His artist statement reads:
"When I first started photographing industry it was out of a sense of awe at what we as a species were up to. Our achievements became a source of infinite possibilities. But time goes on, and that flush of wonder began to turn. The car that I drove cross-country began to represent not only freedom, but also something much more conflicted. 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. I wanted to represent one of the most significant features of this century: the automobile. The automobile is the main basis for our modern industrial world, giving us a certain freedom and changing our world dramatically. The automobile was made possible because of the invention of the internal combustion engine and its utilization of both oil and gasoline. The raw material and the refining process contained both the idea and an interesting visual component for me."
The rest of his images within the set can be found at the web address below for all those who with to continue exploring his work and his important message he is putting across through it.
(http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/site_contents/Photographs/Oil.html)
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