we see in Khan’s.
At which point it is worth emphasising that Khan is himself a composite of artist and photographer. For more than a few current practitioners the advantages of identifying themselves as artists rather than photographers can be summed up as a six-word hustle: Print bigger, sell less for more. For my money Khan is as much of an artist – in the simple sense of everything that is left over from just calling him a photographer – as any young photographer currently working. He is a conceptual artist in an equally straightforward sense: thought is implicit in the act of looking at his work. A lot of contemporary British art flogging itself as conceptual has the intellectual depth of a paddling pool and the gravitas of a helium balloon; Khan’s work is dense, multi-layered (literally) and profound.
The danger is that this composite thing could just become his shtick. He could do every page of every book, every this of every that. ‘Every … Photograph Taken Whilst Travelling Around Europe in the Summer of 2002’ seems a rather pointless novelty – there’s nothing to see. Its relative failure suggests that Khan’s method tends to work better when applied to already existing works of art. You can almost hear certain books summoning him to them. It is only a matter of time, surely, before he does every page of Borges’ story ‘The Aleph’, in which the narrator discovers a spot where ‘all the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist’. Needless to say, not everything lends itself equally fruitfully to his attention. Garry Winogrand said that he took photographs ‘to find out what something will look like photographed’ and Khan, in his mediated way, is motivated by a similarly random curiosity about what might emerge when he opts to give an image the treatment. I’m guessing that a fair amount of stuff gets processed and then discarded once the preliminary findings are in. It’s a small price to pay when the successes are as spectacular as the huge ‘Caravaggio: His Last Years’. Fifteen late works by the painter who, according to John Berger, depicted a world that ‘displays itself in hiding’, who found a promise ‘in the darkness itself’, are turned into a tangled kaleidoscope of disembodied bodies, a swirling knot of light.
In the course of these negative excavations a form of auto-interrogation is at work as Khan’s ‘discoveries’ question the ways in which accumulation can both reveal and obscure essence. ‘Every … William Turner Postcard from Tate Britain’ transforms these great paintings of light and air into a brooding soup with an amoeba-mushroom curdling in the swampy twilight. And yet something glimmers, faintly, through the murk. What could it be?
Walter Benjamin claimed that mechanical reproduction, the process of which Tate postcards are symptoms and which Khan has pushed to an extreme, stripped artworks of their ‘aura’. Ironic ally, Khan’s obsessive reproduction invests works with an aura buried within them. Consistent with Barthes’ notion of what makes a photograph special, this is, simultaneously, something that Khan adds to the originals and which, nonetheless, is already there.
2006
Whether seen on the walls of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, or in the accompanying book published by Steidl, the photographs in Oil bring the viewer face to face with huge and troubling questions. How can we go on producing on this scale? How can we go on consuming like this? Aren’t we at the point where we say, OK, enough is enough? Is it sustainable, the level of luxury and lavishness to which we have become accustomed? In short, how many more of these high-concept, high-value Edward Burtynsky productions can we take?
I am being only slightly facetious. Burtynsky (born in Ontario in 1955) hit his stride in the mid-1980s with the large-format, colour views of Railcuts and Mines, places where raw nature had been scarred and gorged by the agents of economic progress. What resulted, however, was not simply maiming or devastation but a source of potential wonder. By the time of the 2003 retrospective and book Manufactured Landscapes, Burtynsky had extended his range to cover quarries, shipbreaking in Bangladesh, oil fields and refineries, compacted mounds of trash …
Burtynsky’s work has obvious similarities with that of other artist-photographers. Like Richard Misrach (especially in the ‘Bravo 20’ instalment of his ongoing Desert Cantos project), Burtynsky produces images whose beauty is freighted with a political/ecological purpose that is unavoidable and unobtrusive. The pictures can never be reduced to a polemical message, are always compelling – often puzzlingly so – in and of themselves. Some of the quarries, for example, comprise almost abstract blocks of striated marble, floating in a lake of flat, motionless green. Weirdly, the hard, grey-white stones with vertical gouge-scars and veins end up looking like billowing Christo wraps. Even when there are human beings or tools to help us get a fix on things, the scale is hard to comprehend. In some cases, the assault on the landscape is so immense that the idea on which we have long relied to visually orient ourselves – linear perspective – has been abolished. The ecological corollary of this is that we are witnessing something whose consequences are incalculable – if not entirely unprecedented. For it turns out that the template for this outlook was provided by an extraordinary 1932 photograph of a quarry by August Sander (of all people) which hurled the viewer into the vertiginous midst of the picture. Burtynsky’s contemporary vision, in other words, is the product of a creative quarrying of the photographic past. Carleton Watkins, William Henry Jackson, Charles Sheeler and others directly inform Burtynsky’s work and, in turn, are respectfully interrogated and re-animated by it. Burtynsky, then, is an original artist in exactly the sense described and prescribed by T.S. Eliot: part of a tradition that is actively extended and reconfigured by his contribution to it.
The intellectual background to the wealth of photographs showcased in Oil can conveniently be framed by two casual remarks. The first was reported by Raymond Williams, who recalled a miner saying of someone: ‘He’s the sort of man who gets up in the morning and presses a switch and expects a light to come on.’ The other occurred during a conversation I had with the woman who looked after an apartment I was renting in New Orleans during the first Gulf War, in 1991. She was against the war on the grounds that it was really about America’s incessant need for oil. I asked if I might have an extra blanket because, at night, it was a little chilly. ‘Oh,’ she replied. ‘You should just turn the heating up a bit.’
To express it as concisely as possible, the photographs in Oil seek to make visible the invisible connections between these two opposing views of the world, one predicated on scarcity, the other on limitless abundance. Burtynsky offers a vast portfolio of images, from oil fields to refineries, to highways, cities and industries, to recycling and eventual waste. It’s an obviously admirable, important and well-intentioned project by a serious and committed artist.
Why, then, does one baulk at it?
The problem, partly, is that the titular subject – the raw material, as it were – is so pervasive that it ends up being an alternative rubric for a Burtynsky retrospective: the photographic equivalent of an edition of New and Selected Poems in which old favourites (arranged in slightly different permutations) are supplemented by some more recent works. OK, there are no quarries or railcuts, but the Bangladeshi shipbreakers are still toiling away, the tyre piles and densified oil drums are still there … Well, fair enough, nothing wrong with a bit of recycling, but whereas Manufactured Landscapes offered a glimpse of teeming visual possibilities, the totalising vision of Oil induces a feeling of satiety. There are new things (new to me, at any rate), some of them very good, especially the Koyaanisqatsi-style views of the spaghetti tangle of freeways, the cityscapes stretching out to infinity, but once the doubts start to seep in – the suspicion that Burtynsky is photographing the crisis of peak oil and climate change like someone fluently producing company reports – they prove dangerously corrosive.
Burtynsky has long had a fondness for photographing endlessly replicated units of the same thing, whether it’s workers at identical benches
