Edward Burtynsky at The Photographer's Gallery

Some weeks ago now I made my first visit to the new Photographer's Gallery, just off Oxford Street in London http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/. The new gallery is beautiful.

http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/WORKS/Oil/Oil_Book/EXTRACTION_and_REFINEMENT/005-OLF_19B_03_Oil.jpg

I went specifically to see the Edward Burtynsky exhibition of his photographs of the Oil Industry [http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/], which has now finished, unfortunately.  The pictures were pretty amazing. This is the photographer as artist, in my opinion.


There were three floors of giant prints by Burtynsky on the subject of oil. Its manufacture. The disasters. The dereliction it leaves behind.

[If you haven't seen these pictures, take a look at his website, or if you have an iPad (3, for preference) and £6.99 to spare, buy the app which gives you an amazing artist's book of all the images.]

The prints are impressive. Most are 4 foot by 3 foot and saturated in colour. For me, the most impressive images were the deserts full of derelict aircraft and helicopters.

Burtyansky seems mostly to shoot from above. Clearly some of the images are from a helicopter or aircraft. This gives EB an edge not available to most of us.

Even the nearer-earth images seem to have been made from a cherrypicker (or else he's extremely good at finding a high vantage point). This casts the horizon high in the image, since we are looking down, and this gives the images a surreal effect, which is probably what the photographer was after.

The images are impressive for many reasons. I can't say precisely why. Its not just the size. I did wonder to what extent the images are raw and to what extent they had been processed by his camera and his computer.

But, I'm all in favour of image processing, about which more anon.

The final image is the artist's goal and EB has produced some beautiful images of an ugly industry. The much missed Susan Sontag would give a wry smile, I think.

What was EB trying to achieve. Is this Art or reportage? From the artist's statement on his website, it seems his objective is more reportage, but these images reveal an artist's intuition at work. They are carefully composed. They are painterly in their use of colour. They are immediately affecting in their overall aspect, just like paintings by some major artists (of the Renaissance, for example). So they are not just the product of amazing equipment and amazing opportunities. The same advantages in the hands of a less experienced photographer (me, for instance) would not have turned out anything so impressive.