Edward Burtynsky in the Wall Street Journal

Edward Burtynsky in the Wall Street Journal

STARTING IN THE 1990S, advances in digital technology made it easier for photographers to print their work at previously unimaginable sizes. The result was a golden age of vast pictures—typified by the work of artists such as Andreas Gursky—with the kind of impact previously limited to painting or films. But in these social-media–saturated times, when we’re constantly thumbing through palm-size images shared freely on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, is there still a meaningful place for photographs measured in feet?

 

For Edward Burtynsky and Robert Polidori, two of today’s most esteemed practitioners of large-scale photography, the answer is unequivocally yes. And this fall they are both offering fresh reminders of their art’s visual power and relevance with gallery shows and new books. Both Canadian-born, these two artists have spent the past three decades working on loosely parallel tracks, each bringing a sharp aesthetic eye to documentary images that thoughtfully address issues of historical, socioeconomic and ecological consequence. Technically ambitious and often shot in far-flung, challenging locales, their photographs provide perspectives rarely seen. Seductive yet unnerving, they act like mirrors, revealing things about who we are and what we’re becoming.

 

In a way, Edward Burtynsky’s artistic path is the result of a wrong turn. Driving through Pennsylvania in the early ’80s, he wound up in the tiny coal-mining town of Frackville, where he suddenly found himself in a surreal landscape stripped of all traces of nature. He knew then that he’d discovered his mission. “We’re an expanding population that’s bearing down on the resources of the planet,” says the photographer, who has since traversed the globe shooting mines and quarries, oil fields and factories, waterways and farmlands. His bird’s-eye views, often captured from planes, helicopters and, more recently, drones, take an unsparing look at the relationship between humans and nature.

 

Today, Burtynsky oversees a busy Toronto studio, where a small team coordinates logistics for his complex shoots, performs postproduction work and communicates with museums and his 11 galleries around the world. His first new body of work in four years, a group of photographs of Indian salt farms, is being unveiled this fall by galleries in three cities: Flowers in London (through October 29), Nicholas Metivier in Toronto (September 29–October 22) and both Howard Greenberg (November 4–December 31) and Bryce Wolkowitz (November 3–December 23) in New York. Also on display will be a selection of photographs from the forthcoming book Essential Elements (Thames & Hudson), a survey of Burtynsky’s career that pairs familiar images with pictures from his lesser-known series.

 

To capture the salt works, Burtynsky traveled to the Indian state of Gujarat, to an area near the Arabian Sea known as the Little Rann of Kutch. Here more than 100,000 laborers work in a 400-year-old salt-harvesting industry now under threat from a receding water table and unfavorable market forces. Using his 60-megapixel Hasselblad camera, Burtynsky shot from both a helicopter and a Cessna at altitudes between 300 and 4,000 feet. The resulting images (Steidl is publishing a book of them this month) are captivating studies in pattern and color variations. While the salt pans differ in size, shape and configuration, the palette ranges from gray, brown and white to ochre, pink and pale blues and greens.

 

Getting up close to a Burtynsky photograph, the largest of which measure nearly five by seven feet, is a visceral encounter. Unable to take in the entire picture at once, your eyes scan the surface as the image almost envelops you. “At that scale, there’s this hovering-over, bodily experience that I like to work with,” says Burtynsky. “You stand in front of it, and there’s an almost dizzying, vertigo-like effect.”

 

That many of his landscape images, from Spanish dryland farms to New Mexico copper mines to Chinese rice terraces, evoke abstract painting isn’t lost on Burtynsky or his dealers. “He has been coming back to a more abstract visual idea,” says Howard Greenberg, who has co-represented Burtynsky in New York with Bryce Wolkowitz for the past several years. “He’s done that by shooting from even greater heights and eliminating the horizon.”

 

An important element of Burtynsky’s career has been his eagerness to embrace new mediums and technologies, whether employing drones or experimenting with photogrammetry, a process that uses software to translate two-dimensional images of an object, taken from multiple angles, into a rendering that appears 3-D when viewed with virtual-reality goggles. Currently, Burtynsky’s team is working with some 2,300 images he shot before an ivory burn—the destruction of illegally obtained elephant tusks, meant to curb poaching—in Kenya earlier this year. “The technology isn’t quite there yet,” the photographer says, “but the idea is to have this pile of tusks, which was 20 feet high and 20 feet across, rendered in a way that would allow you to put on a VR headset and experience it at scale by walking around it.” Burtynsky’s aim with all of his work is “to have the viewer spend time with and really consider these worlds,” he says. “I want people to enter them.”