Edward Burtynsky

Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco, 2005

San Francisco, Pier 24 Photography, Inaugural Exhibit from the Pilara Family Foundation Collection, November 2009 – July 2010

Edward Burtynsky’s harrowing photographs confront the realities of industrialization and abuse of Earth’s natural resources. Burtynsky has spent extensive periods of time in China photographing the nearly unmatched level of production happening within the country, with particular focus on Bao Steel company. The sixth largest steel producer worldwide, Bao Steel becomes a target for Burtynsky’s lens. Here, Burtynsky grapples with the law of conservation of matter, searching for an inverse relationship between the natural landscape and global industrial need; “For things to be on this scale, I thought, there has to be something equally monumental in the landscape where we have taken all this material from. I felt that Newtonian law implied a reciprocal action in nature–a hole in the ground that meets the scale of the rising skyscrapers” (“The Essential Element: An Interview with Edward Burtynsky”, Manufactured Landscapes, p. 49). Bao Steel #8 irrefutably illustrates the cause and effect of steel manufacturing, with seemingly endless, manmade mountains of sediment receding into a smoggy horizon.