Edward Burtynsky

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Oil, California

Nickel Tailings #34

Silver Lake Operations #15 (Mining in Australia)

Mining in Utah

Shipbreaking

Mining in Australia

Edward Burtynsky’s images construct an incredible tension between the beauty of the photographic image and the terror of an industrial wasteland. This conflicting experience of awe and terror is the experience of what Emmanuel Kant called the sublime. In Kant’s terms, the sublime is the experience of a pleasurable irresistibility of the power of nature that leads us “considered as natural beings, [to] recognize our physical powerlessness,” but in our contemplation we also find ourselves independent and superior to nature. The sublime is accessed by a contemplative state brought about by the visualization of space in which the human subject feels an overwhelming pleasure at the vast space and monumental landscape while also feeling the terror of vertigo at the immensity of such a scene. 

Nineteenth Century photographer, Carleton Watkins, evoked notions of the sublime in his images of the American West. Working on commission for the California State Geological Survey, Watkins’s images depict a landscape that is at once monumental and edenic, constructing a fantasy of a vast and empty land ripe for development. Watkins’s images evoke Kant’s notion of the sublime by presenting the viewer with a mix of awe and fear at the monumentality of the natural formations while asserting man as rational being with dominion over nature in the form of industrial expansion (ie railroad construction). 

Burtynsky’s contemporary landscape photographs reverse Watkins’s ideological depiction of industrial promise by replacing monuments of nature with monuments of industrial waste, exposing the negative results of the over-industrialized landscape. Through the evocation of the tropes of nineteenth century landscape photography and its visualization of the sublime, Burtynsky constructs his critique of environmental destruction.

Here are two of Carleton Watkins's images, taken as part of the 1860s U.S. Geological expeditions (notice the intentional lack of inhabitants despite the presence of native americans in the area at the time):

Cape Horn, Near Celilo Oregon, 1867

In Cape Horn, the railroad bed winds unobtrusively between a pristine river and a monumental cliff. Nature provides a frame for the newly-laid railroad tracks. The photograph constructs a vision of uninterrupted land, open for development. At the time the photo was taken, the railroad was a sign of technological progress (along with the camera). In Cape Horn, the railroad leads the viewer’s gaze into the distance as if beckoning us into the future and into the vast lands of the American west. A photograph such as Cape Horn would have been used by the U.S. government to promote and justify expansion into the “empty” lands of the west. In his essay, “Territorial Photography,” Joel Snyder notes that in Watkins’s photographs of Yosemite he showed the land as “potential real estate and as a site for eastern investment and development” (187) emphasizing the land’s “accessibility and, at the same time, its grandeur” (185).

By Carleton Watkins