Since the mid-1980s, Edward Burtynsky has been photographing landscapes that have been transformed by human intervention. In his early work – a series on mines and one on railway cuttings from 1985; one on quarries from the early 1990s – the human presence took the form of a geometric intrusion into the natural world: regular slabs cut from granite, rail-tracks slicing across a mountainside. The images verge on the abstract, partly because industrial subjects like these tend to have angular shapes, but also because they are often framed without any visible horizon or surrounding context, making them harder to read as landscapes. Your attention first focuses on the large-scale forms that occupy the bulk of the image: it’s only later that you notice scattered signs of human involvement – ladders, cranes, hoses – which are dwarfed by the imprint they have helped make on the environment.

LRB 21 June 2012 | PDF Download