The show is made up of aerial shots of colored water with
the occasional shots of large crowds of Indian people. My guess from looking at
the pictures is that there are a lot of people in India, and the water there is
polluted. Might be something more subtle and complex going on, but subtlety and
complexity are not what Burtynsky’s pictures traffic in. What we get are large,
lifeless pictures that magically suck the excitement out of the most amazing
and fascinating situations. It’s like listening to a monotone reading of an
interesting New Yorker article. On
the upside, there is a pretty decent picture of the after-effects of a body
being cremated on the banks of the Ganges in Varanasi as seen from the river,
where for once Burtynsky’s large negative and larger print pulls out a bunch of
little narratives.
PS The press release doesn’t give much more away than that the
aerial pictures are from all over and are about how our consumption of water is
reshaping the earth. But that fact is indecipherable from the pictures, and
their general blandness is a huge blindside in Burtynsky’s art.
Through Nov. 2nd
2 comments:
I can't quite believe you actually said "...subtlety and complexity are not what Burtynsky’s pictures traffic in..."
Nope. Checked again...that's actually what you wrote. After seeing this latest collection and, I can only hope, his previous works, too. Unbelievable.
Yup and I stand by it, I feel he communicates very little visually besides that he is using a very large negative. I have a hard time bridging the causes he supports with the dry formal pictures he creates.
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