With less than a month left until I
move out of the dorms and into a real house I’m forcing myself to
spend most days up to that point doing data analysis for my
dissertation rather than roaming the streets of London while I’m
still living close enough to Central to do so. Once I move out to
Zone 6 besides being just plain farther out I'll have all the
responsibilities that come with working. The end day time free time
as I've known it. But hey, at least I can say I've made the most of
it, right? In comparison to the other student's I've gotten to know
here, and in comparison to the Londoners I've met and gotten to know
as well, I make more of a point of getting out and doing stuff and
exploring than basically all of them. Which is exactly how, today, I
discovered the newly opened Photographers' Gallery in Soho, free to
the public, just a block away from Oxford Street.
As their name would suggest, The
Photographers' Gallery is the largest public gallery in London
dedicated to photography, as well as the first independent gallery in
Britain to be dedicated to photography. Once occupying two buildings
on a different site, the new gallery on Ramillies Street is a
converted warehouse, five floors of which are dedicated to
exhibitions.
The current exhibit features Canadian
photographer Edward Burtynsky who traveled the world to chronicle the
effect of oil on all our lives, and to reveal the rarely seen
mechanics of its production and distribution.
From the site: This exhibition shows
three sections from Burtynsky’s series OIL: Extraction and
Refinement, Transportation and Motor Culture and The End of Oil. The
works depict landscapes scarred by the extraction of oil, and the
cities and suburban sprawl defined by its use. He also eloquently
addresses the coming end of oil, as we face its rising cost and
dwindling availability.
Burtynsky's color photographs render his subjects with a transfixing clarity of detail. From aerial views of oil fields and highways ribboning across the landscape, to derelict oil derricks and mammoth oil-tanker shipbreaking operations, we are confronted with the evidence of our dependence on this finite resource.
Burtynsky's color photographs render his subjects with a transfixing clarity of detail. From aerial views of oil fields and highways ribboning across the landscape, to derelict oil derricks and mammoth oil-tanker shipbreaking operations, we are confronted with the evidence of our dependence on this finite resource.
The
places photographed in the exhibition sections Extraction and
Refinement and The End of Oil are often remote and
unknown. Although they are vast, they are out of view and not places
we are likely to experience. The large format photographic process
that Burtynsky uses enables acute detail within large-scale prints.
He uses helicopters, cranes and other high vantage points to create
aerial, ‘birds eye view’ shots of the places and subjects he
photographs. He rarely uses close up. This distancing effect gives a
clear impression of the vastness of these operations.
“Human
beings
taking
things from
nature
to provide for
themselves
is not new,
but
the scale is. So if I
wanted
to photograph
a
quarry, I’d look for
the
biggest to show the
gigantic
proportions
of
what we take from
the
land”.
Edward
Burtynsky
Not
surprisingly, much of his work featured landscapes in America: oil
refineries in Texas, interstates in Los Angeles, tire disposal sites
in California, car manufacturing plants, highway exits stops,
airplane dismantling yards...
Burtynsky
has said that he wants his audience to be engaged by both the beauty
and the horror of his images – to be both attracted and repelled.
