Saturday, June 02, 2007

Photography: Edward Burtynsky


On my way to Photo London I popped by Flower Central in Cork Street to admire some well known and some new work of one of my favourite artists: Ed Burtynsky. His prints of man-made landscapes and, more recently, the visually probing insight into contemporary China, are epic and monumental: large scale images of quarries, rubber piles, shipbreaking businesses in Bangladesh and 10.000 people assembly lines like your eyes have never seen it before. His style makes you almost smell all the toxic waste, and it is the details in the pictures that makes you grasp the scale of the sites inspected, like the house-size caterpillar trucks appearing like ants in the gigantic landscape of a quarry.


There are not a lot of photographers that combine "need-for-change" ethos a la Gore and Moore with immaculately crafted high-end aesthetics. And as far as I know, Ed doesn't digitally post-produce like Gursky does.

Until 2 June at Flowers Central, West End

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