Edward Burtynsky

The Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park has an exhibition of Edward Burtynsky's amazing photographs of rock quarries, freighter wrecking beaches in India, eerie mine tailing landscapes in Canada and sorted industrial waste sites - tires, metal, compacted tin cans.

If you go to Burtynsky's site be sure to look at the images of his new series. He went to China to document the Three Gorges project. It seems to me that these pictures share some of the characteristics of the travel landscapes of the 19th century English watercolorists - Roman ruins, charming peasants and grand vistas. With an earth's rotation-altering twist.

How we alter our world, use it's resources, and leave the debris and disaster behind! There is one stunning photo of a Carrera Marble quarry where half the mountain is gone!

Call me unimaginative but I would never have thought to build a freighter in the first place and wouldn't have send an old one to India to be dismantled by a small group of men with an acetylene torch.

Rivers that run bright orange in a Sudbury Nickle mining landscape that is otherwise black is enough to make me consider revoking my Canadian citizenship but where would I land my weak nationalistic impulses then? Where in the world?

Burtinsky's photos are awe inspiring.
What humans can do! :>)
And what humans do! :>(

The Museum is currently setting up an Exhibition of Steve McCurry's work which opens on May 29, 2005. He is the photographer who took the famous image of the blue eyed Afghan girl in 1984.