Edward Burtynsky’s Mesmerizing Images of Copper Mines | Feature in The New York Times Magazine

The scale of an open-pit copper mine feels impossible; it is a Bible-grade phenomenon made by machines. Vehicles called bucket-wheel excavators, nearly five times the size of the largest dinosaurs, rip up the surface and gradually descend, piling 200,000 cubic meters or more of rock behind them every day. Once the copper is extracted, waste products and unrecoverable metals stream out as tailings, snaking tributaries that turn psychedelic-looking as they oxidize in open air for the first time in millions of years. Each excavator, meanwhile, turns the land it is standing on into a ledge and leaves a succession of these steps, or ‘‘benches,’’ behind it as it goes. The Chino Mine, for example, in Grant County, N.M., has been excavated persistently for more than a century and now stretches almost two miles across and 1,350 feet down. It’s a chasm, a void, a deep and disordered amphitheater built around an abyss. It gets four out of five stars on TripAdvisor.

‘‘Wow is that place HUGE If you get time go visit this mine it is just huge,’’ writes one reviewer who visited the overlook point on the side of Highway 152. ‘‘What a huge pit,’’ says another. Another: ‘‘Wow!’’ Another: ‘‘What a hole in the ground’’ And: ‘‘Dange [sic] it’s deep. What a hole!@!!!! Huge hole in the ground.’’

Stupefied giddiness, disbelief: these seem to be universal responses to open-pit mines. When the photographer Edward Burtynsky started taking pictures of mining complexes in 1981, it was, in part, out of this same simple wonderment. ‘‘I look for the biggest mines in the world,’’ Burtynsky says, and these photographs, shot in Arizona and New Mexico in 2012 and published here for the first time, include both the Chino and the continent’s largest copper mine, the Morenci Mine, which is projected to produce 900 million pounds of copper every year for the next five years.

Open-pit mines are wounds we’ve inflicted, and the wonderment they excite easily becomes tinged with pangs of remorse or dread. Burtynsky calls that storm of feeling ‘‘a reversal of the sublime. In the beginning, ‘the sublime’ meant us in fear of nature,’’ he explains. We would look up at a thundercloud or mountain, or across a heavy sea, and be ‘‘awe-struck or powerless. But fast forward to the Industrial Revolution, and 150 years after that, and now we are the awesome and fearsome force that’s reshaping the planet.’’

And that power can’t be disowned. ‘‘We work in a world of atoms and molecules,’’ Burtynsky told me. ‘‘I’m talking to you on a phone. There’s copper in this phone.’’ It’s in our appliances and cars, inside the walls of our homes. ‘‘If you feel revulsion to this landscape,’’ he said, ‘‘you should have a revulsion to your whole life.’’ 

 

That tension is irreconcilable, maybe inevitable. Humans have always ripped materials out of nature, but the pace and scale of that extraction has accelerated so quickly that it challenges, or even outpaces, the individual human imagination’s ability to make sense of the consequences. It’s a strange predicament: to feel dwarfed by the momentum of your own species; to feel yourself being threatened, even swallowed up, by problems and to recognize that you’re also complicit in them. Think of how the person operating the excavator must feel, disappearing down the mine.

Burtynsky’s photographs are opportunities to stare that dilemma in its abysmal eye and let that tension in; to look down — way down in these mines — and allow yourself to feel unsettled, to lose your balance a little.

‘‘Huge hole in the ground,’’ one of the more pensive TripAdvisor reviewers wrote. ‘‘I just imagine falling into that hole.’’ Exactly. There may be no getting to the bottom of any of this.

Read original article @ The New York Times Magazine

 

By David Pagel

May 15, 2015

If ants had cameras—as well as helicopters, drones and hydraulic lifts—they might make photographs that look a lot like Edward Burtynsky’s sublime pictures of the marks humans have made on our planet.

These include massive dams, mines, wells and farms, alongside quarries, irrigation systems and flood control plains. At Von Lintel Gallery, the Canadian photographer, who has traveled the globe to make his stunning images, invites visitors to see humanity as a species—not as unique individuals who stand out from the crowd, but as indistinguishable, and very small, components of a much larger whole—like ants in a colony.

That’s a fascinating perspective, partly because it flies in the face of the way we usually look at art—as an embodiment of the singular genius of singular geniuses—and partly because it gets us to look at the big picture: our global economy in which some fundamental resources—like water, air and food—may not be able to sustain the rate at which humans have been reproducing. What that means for life as we know it is the subject of Burtynsky’s panoramic landscapes.

Beauty and ugliness, nature and industry, exist cheek-by-jowl in his crystal-clear pictures. Some are hellish, their glistening lakes of radioactive oil bleeding from the Earth like a toxic wound that won’t heal. Others are gorgeous, their snow-capped peaks and steep ravines so breathtakingly vast that they make human beings seem inconsequential.

Most are both. A drone’s-eye view of a dam under construction on the Yangtze River presents an entirely manmade landscape that looks utterly alien, like a concrete spaceship so far out in the galaxy that it’s impossible to tell up from down, left from right, right from wrong. Shot from helicopters, two views of terraced mountainsides, where Chinese farmers grow rice, show what daily labor adds up to when it’s done over centuries.

Above all else, Burtynsky’s pictures are humbling. Sober and sensible, they make it clear just how little individuals can do on our own while suggesting that as a group we have a lot to learn from ants.

Read more @ LA TIMES

Edward Burtinynsky's "Nature Transformed" @ Von Lintel Gallery, Los Angeles | Juxtapoz Magazine Feature

Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of large-format color photographs by renowned photographer, Edward Burtynsky. the photographer is known for his incisive look at landscapes reshaped by human interference. Nature Transformed primarily culls from Water, a five-year project chronicling the dramatic effects of manufacturing and consumption on the world’s most vital and rapidly depleting resource. Science fiction-esque irrigation plots in Texas, ancient carved stepwells in India, and geometric rice terraces in China are translated in vivid color and crystalline detail from upwards of 7,000 feet. The aerial perspective necessarily brings into focus the massive scale and impact of these systems employed to redirect and control water. “I document landscapes that, whether you think of them as beautiful or monstrous, or as some strange combination of the two, are clearly not vistas of an inexhaustible, sustainable world,” Burtynsky states. “We have to think more long-term about the consequences of what we are doing, while we are doing it. My hope is that these pictures will stimulate a process of thinking about something essential to our survival, something we often take for granted—until it’s gone.”

Also on view are images depicting the pitch black Volcanic sands of Iceland, marking Burtynsky’s return to pristine wilderness for the first time in over thirty years, and photographs from the Oil series: rectilinear rigs in Asia and tar sands operations in Alberta, Canada

Exhibtion runs: April 25 -June 20, 2015

Read original article @ Juxtapoz Magazine
 

artsy | Jamie Lee Curtis Picks the 9 Best Works from Paris Photo L.A.

For actress Jamie Lee Curtis, the early 1980s began her heyday as the horror genre’s “Scream Queen,” her marriage to Christopher Guest, and the couple’s foray into art collecting—photographs and original cartoons. In advance of Paris Photo Los Angeles, Curtis, still an avid photography collector, picked out the nine works that she finds most compelling at the fair.

In 1984 we were newlyweds, living in TriBeCa while [Guest] was doing a year on SNL, and it was only a few years after Cindy Sherman’s work had first started to be exhibited. I saw a piece in a magazine about her work and Chris and I went to Metro Pictures and wondered if we should buy an “Untitled Film Still” or the new, bigger, color work. The platinum blond, in a suit with fists clenched, reminded me of the town where I grew up—and so we bought it. I remember at the time that it was costly but in our new marital partnership, a wonderful first art purchase together.

Over these 30 years we have added to our collection with an eclectic group of images. We are not art snobs, we don’t read art criticism, and we don’t work with an art consultant. We buy what we like—what moves us and what we can afford. We have some masters of the form, Irving Penn, Sally Mann, Sebastião Salgado, alongside newer photographers; a Shawna Ankenbrandt nude hangs next to an Alexandra Hedison composite. I recently bought two pieces from my niece, Lena Hindes, who, for her senior art piece in high school, did this work as her reaction to the shaming of pubic hair in today’s society. They are photographs that she crocheted over. Stunning work and so exciting.

Edward Burtynsky

Dryland Farming #2, Monegros County, Aragon, Spain, 2010

I love Edward Burtynsky’s work at Von Lintel Gallery. His perspective on the beauty of nature and its power is very strong. It reminded me of Salgado's "Genesis" at Peter Fetterman. It’s a grand perspective, an emotional understanding of life. 

Read more @ artsy

artnet | Paris Photo Los Angeles Is Set to Have Its Best Year Yet—See Why

By Cait Munro, Monday, April 27, 2015 

Opening May 1, Paris Photo Los Angeles is back for its third consecutive year at Paramount Pictures Studios, bringing the best photography from around the world to the city of the silver screen. With 80 galleries from 17 countries, it's a shutterbug's paradise (see Paris Photo LA Taps the West Coast's Emerging Art Market). 

Unlike larger, less specialized fairs where gallerists often choose to feature a single artist, most of the galleries showing at Paris Photo are bringing works from an assortment of the photographers in their stable. Of course, for those that exclusively deal in photography, it's a tougher choice. 

Read more @ artnet 

Paris Photo comes back to L.A. | VLG Featured in California Sunday Magazine

From May 1 to 3, Paris Photo, the international art fair for photography and video, will take over much of Paramount Pictures Studios in Hollywood for its third edition. More than 75 art galleries and book publishers will set up on soundstages and in backlots. Here is a look at some of the images that will be on exhibit, selected by California Sunday Photography Director Jacqueline Bates, from artists and galleries in the West, Asia, and Latin America. 

Read more @ California Sunday Magazine

Edward Burtynsky's "Nature Transformed" Large-Format Photographs At Von Lintel Gallery - April 25 To June 7, 2015

Edward Burtynsky's Nature Transformed at Von Lintel Gallery (2685 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles) from April 25 to June 7, 2015. There will be an opening reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Saturday, April 25. This is Burtynsky's first solo show with the gallery. The artist is known for his look at how landscapes are reshaped via human interference. These large-scale photographs are from far above and turn these images of rice terraces and irrigation plots into colorful images that seem almost out of science fiction. They are beautiful, staggering and sometimes terrifying pieces in their implication. 

Burtynsky's work is featured in the collections of over 60 major museums. His fifth book, Burtynsky-Water, came out in 2013 along with a documentary Watermark. We posted o this last year. Any opportunity to see his work in person should be seized.

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