Kerry Kilburn Artist Post: Burtynsky - Water 2/22/2016

Edward Burtynsky

Oil Spill #5 Q4000 Drilling Platform, Gulf of Mexico, USA 2010

Burtynsky realized that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was a unique opportunity to photograph a "big industrial incursion" into a seascape, one that was begun by humans but that ultimately could not be contained by humans. For me, this photograph brings home two aspects of the spill that are/were hard to grasp. First, the height from which he took the shot allows the human structures to be dwarfed by the oil spill, showing just how big the spill was. Second, the high contrast and saturated colors have the effect of making the oil nearly tangible in its gooey-ness while the platform and ships seem almost not to touch it. These effects give the oil a life of its own - it's going to do what it's going to do, and we are (were) pretty helpless to stop it (or even to predict its long-term consequences).

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Colorado River Delta #7. Abandoned Shrimp Farms, Sonora, Mexico 2012

The Colorado River delta is supposed to drain the Colorado River into the Sea of Cortez. Unfortunately, its water has been so heavily diverted for urban and agricultural use that what was once over a million acres of wetland and riparian forest is now barren desert (for a nice story on beginning restoration efforts, see "Saving the Colorado River Delta, One  Habitat at a Time"). As a conservationist and a former Californian, the loss of this delta has always felt personal to me, and it's always been a dream to see it restored. I found the composition of this image to be especially powerful. At first glance, I read it as sand reaching for the shrimp farms from the bottom of the frame (the south) while the water from the river was striving to reach them from the top of the frame (the north). Then I saw the piece of the canal in the corner, and was reminded that what I was really seeing was a river being sucked dry and retreating *to* the north. Devastating.

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Mount Edziza Provincial Park, Northern British Columbia, Canada, 2012

In his "Source" images, Burtynsky takes us to the mountains and glaciers of Iceland and British Columbia to where it all begins. I found this image to be especially haunting. By shooting so that the viewer's head is almost level with the highest visible peak, Burtynsky brings this magnificent landscape down to a human scale and imbues it with a fragility it wouldn't have if he'd shot from a lower angle. I couldn't help but think of how anthropogenic climate change is causing those glaciers to melt and retreat, potentially destroying water sources we take so much for granted.