3/100 Edward Burtynsky, making the ugly beautiful

Maybe the private view of Edward Burtynsky’s Extraction/Abstraction at the Saatchi Gallery wasn’t the best introduction to his photography. I find it difficult to comprehend art in crowded galleries and last night was exceptionally busy, although the crowd added a certain dimension of urgency to Burtynsky’s work. The juxtaposition between London’s well heeled art crowd and the reality of what we were seeing on the walls, stark. I want to go back to properly focus on his work, and the exhibition is so large that it will reward repeated viewings.

Spread over two floors, Extraction/Abstraction is a retrospective, featuring a vast collection of Edward Burtynsky’s photographs and films bearing witness to the impact of industrialisation on the planet. Recently, I have been grappling with the idea of how to make the invisible visible, it is this that Burtynsky does so successfully across the span of his work. Here we see the large scale effects of industrialisation, including oil spills, mining, factory farming. With such difficult subjects, it could be possible to assume the exhibition would be ugly or hard going. It’s neither. Each piece of work is stunning. I was hardly able to believe I was seeing photographs and not paintings. Despite the beauty it’s possible to wonder similar to my son the day we saw a pheasant shoot in the fields behind the farm we lived on. He was three at the time, we were out a walk when shots from the adjacent field alerted us to the presence of a shooting party. These shots were followed shortly after by the bodies of pheasants almost pirouetting to the ground as they fell. I found it oddly beautiful to see them fall in this way, but when I said this to my son, he said, I’m sure it’s not beautiful in the next field. And of course he was right. Burtynsky’s work is much the same, he’s made it beautiful, but through different eyes of or in the hands of a less skilled photographer, it might be otherwise.

It’s this beauty that adds to the complexity of the work, in finding something essentially ugly beautiful, the viewer’s moral compass is thrown of. Here we have to implicate not just ourselves in terms of the consequences of our collective actions, but how our individual quests for beauty have impacted on the landscape. What Burtynsky presents here are landscapes marred and created by our extractions, throwing into question what can now be classed as manmade and natural; surely nearly every landscape is manmade to a certain degree, even ones we class as wild. And there is a certain undeniable beauty in this legacy, despite the wider horror it’s caused.

It’s a clever move on Burtynsky’s part to bring alive our impact like this. In exploiting the gravitational appeal of beauty, he forces us to look at what we otherwise prefer to avoid. Additionally, he brings alive what exists largely in complex, dull and often refuted data sets, and it’s this that’s the enduring success of the retrospective, for the first time, I really saw what we’ve done.