Dispatches from the Depletion Zone: Edward Burtynsky and the Documentary Sublime

Abstract

The scope of China's contemporary transformation is measured by many observers according to the environmental crisis it has engendered. One of the most ambitious attempts to document this transformation has been the recent work by Edward Burtynsky. The China series is the latest contribution to the Canadian photographer's grand tour of industrial landscapes. Burtynsky employs the same approach and rules of composition across terrains and topics, and there is indeed nothing radically new in terms of subject or composition in the China series. Yet, linked to the question of scale that is so central to Burtynsky's approach, the question of the sublime offers a useful point of entry for approaching the China series, not only because it is so routinely inscribed in this (heterogeneous) tradition, but because the concept has also played a key role in the refashioning of Chinese aesthetics to stress the heroism of Chinese industrial ambition. And the suggestion, evident in the attentiveness to the scale of environmental devastation, that the sublime can no longer be invoked to legitimate a techno-feudalist course of development, can initiate a political conversation, even if the photographer's aesthetic does not offer an idiom with which to engage the complexities of cultural difference.