Edward Burtynsky's large-scale photographs are undeniably beautiful, said Kenneth Baker in the San Francisco Chronicle. But in his work, beauty means trouble. Burtynsky photographs landscapes massively altered by industry. In one picture, a river polluted by a nickel mine runs bright orange. This traveling retrospective covers 20 years of the Canadian artist's photographs of nature under siege: Rock quarries look like immense skyscrapers, while at a shipbreaking yard in Bangladesh the world's biggest tankers lie torn apart on the beach.
But Burtynsky is not interested in a one-note environmental screed, said Robert L. Pincus in The San Diego Union-Tribune. He simply documents places we usually avoid. These are precisely the places where natural resources are eventually transformed into the things we use and buy: buildings, cars, boats. 'œThe way he photographs these places creates a weird sense of wonder.' The awe-inspiring cavity of a quarry in Vermont is 'œakin to architecture in reverse, with the layered walls of gray' surrounding open space. Burtynsky frames these images like paintings; his sense of scale echoes 19th-century landscapes by Thomas Cole or Albert Bierstadt, who painted the deepest canyons and highest mountains of the Americas.
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