[Edward Burtynsky’s “Drylands Farming #7” — farms in Monegros County, Aragon, Spain.]
Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley recently posted an interview with infrastructural landscape photographer extraordinaire Edward Burtynsky, as a component of their latest project, the continentally-roaming Venue (self-described as a “portable media rig, interview studio, multi-format event platform, and forward-operating landscape research base”). In it, Burtynsky aptly describes his work as “looking for the disconnected landscapes that provide us with the materials we need to live, build, and do everything we do”, which suggests that his photography could be understood as an attempt to achieve the re-wiring of our understanding of the physical phenomenon of urbanization from a well-bounded object characterized primarily by some threshold of density towards an operative (lively, pulsating) material network whose dendritic tentacles reach deep into remote forests, sink into and carve out mountains, and even stretch across oceans. Which (beyond the immediate aesthetic impact of Burtynsky’s photographs, which can be awe-inspiring in large format) would explain why I am so fond of it.
[You can learn more about Venue here.]
