Photographs of wonder and bewilderment

Daniel Nelson

When you enter photographer Edward Burtynsky’s latest show you think you have accidentally stepped into an art exhibition. 

His aerial shots of salt pans in the Indian state of Gujarat look like paintings. They can’t be photographs, is your instinctive response: the lines are too defined, the details of colour too sharp, the contrast control has been turned up too high.

You don’t see any of the 100,000 workers extracting salt from the floodwaters of the Arabian Sea: you see lines and colours that appear to be rough drawings coloured to look like a paint box or a row of dirty knives. 

Upstairs at the Flowers Gallery in east London, another set of his pictures look less “painterly” – a word much favoured by the culture critics union – and more like the large-format digital photos for which the Canadian photographer is famous.

They are selected from past work on quarries, water and landscapes created by huge industrial projects.

They and the topographical salt pans of the Little Ran of Kutch are unfailingly stunning, generating a sense of awe as you pick out a tiny vehicle in a massive construction area, or details such as the piles of carefully stacked bricks in a vast demolition site that looks as though it’s been pulverised by the world’s deadliest typhoon. 

Burtynsky

 is a chronicler of the human footprint, which through his implacable lens looks less like an imprint in the sand than a Monty Python foot suddenly dropping out of the sky to crush the life out of whatever is under it.

He once wrote: “For 25 years I have created images about the man-made transformation our civilisation has imposed upon nature. During the course of my work I have become anxiously aware of the consequences our actions are having upon the world. 

“In 1997 I had […] my oil epiphany. It occurred to me that all the vast man-altered landscapes I had pursued for over 20 years had been made by the discovery of oil and the progress occasioned by the internal combustion engine.”

These are pictures of wonder and bewilderment – at our ability to re-shape Earth and inability to see where this apparently irresistible power is leading.

* Edward Burtynsky: Salt Pans/ Essential Elements, free, is at Flowers, 82 Kingsland Road, E2, until 29 October. Info: 7920 7777/ info@flowersgallery.com/ www.flowersgallery.com

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