The Photographers' Gallery: Burtynsky’s OIL

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.

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.