Continuing through April 29, 2017
It may feel as though there's no shortage of photographers capturing landscapes corroded by the wear and tear of human intervention, but Edward Burtynsky is arguably the original, and remains the poet laureate of the form. This latest series, "Industrial Abstract," is so seductive that one is likely to lose sight of the devastating carnage being depicted. "Chino Mine # 3, Silver City, New Mexico, USA," which dates back to 2012 (though most works here are from 2016), features a vaguely trapezoidal span of road, hillside and summit plot striations that positively glow with a spectrum of earth tones (you can't get any sense of its potency from a jpeg). Burtynsky employs the highest-end digital camera equipment that exists, and along with the use of helicopter vantages produces images with such high resolution that you can hone in close with nary a stray pixel in sight. In addition to the top flight resolutions, he also appears to have mastered an angled perspective — somewhere between 50 and 65 degrees overhead — that describes the earth's curvature. Seduction aside, a devil's advocate could say that documenting these tattered industrial sites and selling them quite successfully on the market doesn't seem like enough to help address the toll he documents. Hopefully Burtynsky has charitable causes that are also his beneficiaries.
