An award winning documentary film about the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky, Manufactured Landscapes opens with an 8-minute-long moving camera sequence showing a massive production line in China. It is quite amazing to see how vast the factory space is, but it is also striking how all of the uniformed young factory workers are working very quietly. This point summarizes issues surrounding the whole project: Burtynsky’s persistence in distancing his subject matter of the environment, mass production for consumption and unfair labour relationships in the world. Instead, he inserts the technicalities of his camera operation, lighting problems, the difficulties involved in getting permission to shoot.
Even though he successfully delivers a magnificent picturesque exploration of elements of a Chinese manufactured landscape, I am disturbed by the gazes of the people who he captured in the landscape. He shows hundreds and thousands of uniformed factory workers as a landscape, and there are some eyes looking at the camera. Those black eyes don’t necessarily tell any story; they are present only as elements of the big landscape. There are a few moments in the film, in which people (mainly Chinese) are only present to demonstrate the scale of a ship, or the grotesquerie and bizarreness of toxic wastes dumped in a mountain. There is a shot of innocent children running about on a mountain of dumped electronics, and the film crew position them to sit in a more elevated position, to get the shot they want. There is another shot in which local people are holding an instant picture, and jokingly critique the picture; the camera ignores the people and focuses instead on the photograph within the shot. There are constant reminders of the importance of ‘the picture’ and ‘the act of taking pictures’ in the film.
I cannot help but question Burtynsky’s apparent sense of duty to show this ‘beauty’ in the landscape. His team tries to persuade an authoritarian Chinese man to allow them to shoot an oil waste mountain, by showing him how beautifully Burtynsky has shot an abandoned machinery landscape. The photographer managed to get the permission from him and took a striking picture of an oil waste mountain. Then he cuts quickly to his mounted frames in their gallery rooms, being studied closely by Western audiences.
He confesses to the audience (in the film) that there was a time that he wanted to put his artworks into more political settings, but he instead wanted to provoke people’s perspectives through ‘saying nothing’, so that his works allow people to think differently.
It seems to me that he has a license to be passive in his engagement with politics, because he is a photographer and trained in fine art; Burtynsky’s position implies that aiming at the symbolic and the poetic has a far higher value than shouting on the street for environmental activism. Perhaps his aesthetic distance tells a powerful story more deeply to the right people.
Can Manufactured Landscape stand alone as magnificent photography without being actively involved in its politics? Can it be just a generic ‘landscape’ without specifying that this is happening in ‘China’? The terrible things we are doing to nature and the environment are luxurious questions for the local people who earn 2.6 pounds (30 yuan) a day. Without addressing the global patterns of consumption, and how power structures started, this ‘manufactured landscape’ is a hollow alarm. (If Burtynsky ever wanted to make an alarm).
Taey 2009