Edward Burtynsky: Photography, Film, and the Politics of Nature

Presenter: Shuting Zeng Advisor: Prof. Alan Braddock

Photography and Film

Edward Burtynsky Jennifer Baichwal: the Directress

Cammaer’s Critique

• High Art is not art for society ?• High Art’s social influence• Burtynsky’s photos exhibited on his website

• Film is superior over photography? • Photography’s wider reception • The film’s derivative relevance to the photography

Contextualization

• an active reading of photography

• an incorporation of photography into multi-media

Atrocity Aesthetics

Compassion and Pity only Sociological Imagination

Timothy O’Sullivan,Bodies of Federal Soldiers Killed at Gettysburg, 1863.

Edward Burtynsky, Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Dehui City, Jilin Province, 2005.

Edward Burtynsky, Shipyard #11, #12, and #13, Shipyard, Qili Port, Zhejiang Province, 2005

Edward Burtynsky, Feng Jie #4, Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, 2002

Ai Weiwei, He Xie, 2010–Installation view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, 2012Photo: Cathy Carver

Ai Weiwei, He Xie, 2010–

Edward Burtynsky, Feng Jie #4,Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, 2002

Bibliography • Battani, Marshall. "ATROCITY AESTHETICS: Beyond Bodies and Compassion." Afterimage 39, no. 1/2 (-07-01,

2011): 54. • Cammaer, Gerda. "Edward Burtynsky's Manufactured Landscapes: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Creating

Moving Still Images and Stilling Moving Images of Ecological Disasters." Environmental Communication 3, no. 1 (-03-01, 2009): 121-130, DOI: 10.1080/17524030802700599.

• Christy, Matt. "EDWARD BURTYNSKY." Art Papers Magazine (September 2012): 57-58. • Economy, Elizabeth. The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China's Future. Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 2004. • Hariman, Robert and John Louis Lucaites. No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal

Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. • Michael Torosian, “The Essential Element: An Interview with Edward Burtynsky”, in Manufactured

Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky by Edward Burtynsky, Lori Pauli, Mark Haworth-Booth, Kenneth Baker, and Michael Torosian, 46-55. New Haven: National Gallery of Canada / Yale University Press, 2003.

• Ngai, Pun. "Becoming Dagongmei (Working Girls): The Politics of Identity and Difference in Reform China." The China Journal 42, no. 42 (1999): 1-18.

• Shapiro, Judith. Mao's War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

• Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. • Yacavone, Kathrin. Benjamin, Barthes, and the Singularity of Photography. New York: Continuum, 2012.

Websites• Ai Weiwei, He Xie, 2010–. Collection of the artist. Installation

view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., 2012. Photo: Cathy Carver.

• http://www.hirshhorn.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Ai-Weiwei-He-Xie1.jpg

• Edward Burtynsky, Edward Burtynsky: Photographic Works, his personal website.

• http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/ • Jennifer Baichwal, the interview “Manufactured Landscapes”, tvo

docstudio, date unknown. • http://docstudio.tvo.org/story/manufactured-landscapes