Thursday, May 31, 2007

manufactured landscapes


last night i was at the Canadian Cultural Centre here in Paris for the opening of a show of Edward Burtynsky's photographs. i've seen several of the photographs before, but i hadn't seen the Three Gorges series in full-size print--and like a lot of landscape & architecture photographers, Burtynsky's work loses its impact in tiny reproductions (i apologize for the little image here.) His series on what's currently the world's largest engineering and construction site, the Three Gorges Dam project along the Yangtze River, finally gives an understandable picture of the massive scale, and of the 1.2 million people displaced for the project. no editorializing, just brilliant photographs. the show is on all summer...so go!

The image above plays against all those wintery-white Canadian landscapes...this is "Uranium Tailings #7" (1995) from Elliot Lake, Ontario.

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