Sleepwalking on Water
By Richard B. Woodward
in the Wall Street Journal
'Cerro Prieto
Geothermal Power Station, Baja, Mexico' (2012) Edward Burtynsky/Nicholas
Metivier Gallery/Howard Greenberg & Bryce Wolkowitz
New Orleans
The Canadian
photographer Edward Burtynsky has rolled out his "Water" project this
fall with the synergistic marketing aggression of a Hollywood blockbuster.
Seven galleries in six cities and three countries have been selling gigantic
examples of the work, which offers his global perspective on water and
civilization. Some prints are 10 feet across. "Watermark," a
feature-length documentary he co-directed with Jennifer Baichwal, has opened in
select cities across Canada. The big, handsome and pricey catalog ($128),
published by Steidl, even has an interactive iPad app.
Against the glare of
this media-blitz, the national museum tour of "Water" is quietly
making its first stop in New Orleans. As if to avoid being dismissed as an
afterthought, the Contemporary Arts Center here, and the New Orleans Museum of
Art, have given Mr. Burtynsky plenty of room to spread out and elaborate an
argument. More than 50 wall-size prints occupy two floors of the CAC, while an
additional eight prints line the entrance hall at NoMA.
With Hurricane Katrina
as the invisible backdrop, the setting could hardly be improved upon. What U.S.
city could be a more suitable host for a provocative show about water
management than this swampy Southern port, tenuously guarded by levees, and prone
to stormy incursions from the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico?
As it happens, the
first photograph at the CAC—of two fireboats spraying water on the crippled Deepwater
Horizon oil-drilling platform
in 2010—tells you everything that's impressive and frustrating about Mr.
Burtynsky's ambitions.
Like all the images in
the project, it's an aerial view in which human presence is dwarfed by the
scale of nature's majesty. The vast dark-green ocean glistens as two small red
boats symmetrically douse the wellhead where a crown of fire shoots into the air.
Other views on walls nearby, taken weeks later, track the oil spreading across
the water like a ghostly white shroud.
Whatever their
meaning, however, all of Mr. Burtynsky's photographs are gorgeous because
primarily they are about colored patterns on colored surfaces. Even though we
know that oil from the rig killed untold numbers of birds and fish, and fouled
the Gulf's waters for months, if not years, imperiling people's livelihoods
from Texas to Florida, Mr. Burtynsky's camera turns these cruel facts into
seductive abstractions.
His project is
therefore more about the gross limitations and deceptive allure of photography.
Any helpful information it can sometimes convey is beside the point. The
fireboats in that first photograph, vainly showering the oily flames,
illustrate nothing so much as technical ineptitude. As BP soon (but not soon
enough) learned, the fissure in the gushing wellhead originated near the ocean
floor, below the water's surface.
To give Mr. Burtynsky
credit, he isn't claiming to offer solutions to vexing planetary issues. He is
merely surveying the many states and uses of water around the world. Sorted
into categories such as "Distress," "Control,"
"Agriculture, "Aquaculture," "Waterfront" and
"Source," his pictures document the remarkable variety of forms human
beings have devised to harness the vital power of water: canals, stepwells,
floating greenhouses, rice terraces, ditches, ponds, circular sprinklers,
sewage plants and hydro-electric dams.
He has followed water
back to its ancestral home as ice in polar glaciers, into the salty deserts of
California, Arizona, Mexico and Spain, and along the continental littorals
where apartment high-rises have shot up in response to the yearning to be near
an ocean beach.
Mr. Burtynsky is at
his best when presenting the mystical place of water in the human mind. Four
views of this year's Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, India, a 55-day Hindu festival
where as many as 100 million people may gather for sacred bathing, hints at the
spiritual communion that allows this 1.24 billion-person democracy to function.
Another 2013 photograph of the ghats at Varanasi, where devout Hindus go to
cremate their dead, teems with unpredictable activity. One can even spot a
traffic jam on the steps where several parties are waiting their turn to carry
a ceremonially wrapped corpse on a bier down to the Ganges.
Elsewhere, the
God's-eye view of Mr. Burtynsky's camera tends to flatten rather than
illuminate crucial details about life and water. Soaring IMAX perspectives are always thrilling at first,
until one senses that everything is rendered with an impersonal, elevated
sameness. (The fact that his digital prints are all super-size doesn't help
matters either. With respect to color quality, the catalog is preferable.)
Photographers have
known for more than 150 years that any landscape seen from a height provides
novel angles of familiar ground-level objects and can give any image automatic
theatricality. Nadar took his camera over Paris in a balloon during the 1860s,
while Edward Steichen directed an airline surveillance unit in World War I.
David T. Hanson, Emmet Gowin, Terry Evans, David Maisel, Doug Rickard and
Trevor Paglen are a few of the many artists who have shown us earth anew by
photographing from above.
"Where I
Stand," a 10-minute film that concludes Mr. Burtynsky's show, suggests
that his project may have gone wrong from the beginning. He states proudly that
he no longer has to search for his pictures. They are "predetermined"
by his choice of site. When he arrives somewhere and sends his camera up in the
sky, either strapped to a remotely controlled miniature helicopter or attached
to a full-size one he has boarded himself, he already knows the photograph he
intends to make.
This may account for
the dutiful gamut of "Water." Almost none of the pictures has an
internal urgency. Walking through the show, one feels that Mr. Burtynsky has
been visiting these places after ticking off boxes on a mental checklist.
Efficiency has bred pictorial complacency.
Like his 1997-2007
project, "Oil," Mr. Burtynsky's "Water" is harmless, the
photographs being politically neutral in the tradition of National Geographic.
If they won't do much to help better analyze or decide contentious questions
about the economics of water use, one reason lies with photography's poor
vocabulary as an explanatory medium.
That doesn't absolve
the photographer from sharing any responsibility, however. Less awesomeness and
a tighter focus on individuals, as they go about daily handling common natural
resources, might yield a different kind of dramatic material for Mr. Burtynsky's
hungry camera. A more grounded point of view would at any rate be a welcome
change from what the poet Robert Lowell once termed the "monotonous
sublime."
Mr. Woodward is an
arts critic in New York.
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