by Only a few photographers have done more than Edward Buryynsky to form our view of the large -scale industrial production that is a constantly growing part of the capitalist system. Since the 1980s, he has created more than a dozen multiyear series in which he traveled to the different places such as Western Australia, Chiles Atacama desert and the so-called ship engrave from Bangladesh in India, China and Azerbaijan.
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His photos, which were often taken by the high sky, offer views of industrial landscapes that take care of color and patterns with a demanding eye that is reminiscent of the abstract expressionism, and at the same time force us to struggle with the devastating transformations into the natural world that is necessary to maintain our lifestyle.
Burynsky’s new show in the International Center of Photography in New York entitled The Great Acceleration brings around 70 photos from a life behind the lens. An attempt is made to enable a suitable overview of a masterful photographic career, and the greatest photographic murals that Burynsky has ever made is presented.
His relationship with the medium started when he was about 12 years old when he got his first camera. As a small child, he spent hours with his father, who had hoped to become an artist, but finally worked in factories. After learning landscapes and painting carefully with oils, the lightness of the photos was a revelation. “I just found that I can create a landscape in a fraction of a second – only, boom, it is there,” Burynsky told me. “I thought it was great how it was a modern, faster gone to get her picture, and I loved the darkroom and watched the picture showing up.”
Similarly, Burynsky’s relationship with the industrial world, which has become his topic, goes back to his formative years as a tool and the manufacturer, and became from old age in factories and saw first-hand how dirty, loud and dangerous they really were. “When I saw the extent of the industry as a young 18-year-old who worked in these places,” said Burynsky, “I could say that if we became this population of this growth that they projected, everything would be even bigger and more insane.”
Burynsky turned away from such a life and began studying the graphic and after a well -coordinated advance of one of his trainers, he decided to maintain formal lessons in photography. After spending so much time in the heavy industry, he said that it was a revelation: “Suddenly I am exposed to the entire history of art and the entire history of music and the entire history of photography.” Burynsky received important influences such as Eadweard Muybridge, Carleton Watkins, Caspar David Friedrich and Painters from New York School, especially Jackson Pollock. There he also began to develop his distinctive way of seeing the world.
“I liked the type of field painting, the compression of the room, the gesture, the color fields in abstract expressionism,” he said. “So I started making landscapes, but I said:” I won’t just go into the forest and do clichés like everyone else. I will try to make Jackson Pollocks with a large -formatic camera. I will try to make my eye right so that I can find really complex spaces in nature that are almost equal. “
Because of this picturesque eye, Burynsky is his work with an undeniable beauty, a fact that critics sometimes made restless. Shots such as that of a huge stepwell in Rajasthan or in the Chino mine in Silver City, New Mexico, are fascinating in their complexity, its color arrangement and the hypnotic way, how Burynsky framed the countless lines in it. When his photographs of the environmental destruction are beautiful, Burynsky defends her with the ground that this pleasure causes curiosity and commitment, which leads to a potentially fertile dialogue.
“There are all sorts of problems that rise.” Well, now, I don’t see it. But maybe. Perhaps. I really try to find a visual language that has a picturesque or surreal quality that shows the world that we have developed so further, which makes people deal with it, and say: “This is just a banal picture of something I am not interested in.”
Burynsky is clear that his pictures should not be didactic, but puzzling, entry points and not endpoints. Although it is difficult to look at recordings such as a washing tire that was thrown away or a honeycomb with the mining without an extractive mining to feel an intestinal reaction of shame and eco-fear, his photographs are much more than just an environmentally protected agitprop. The artist is proud of the many interpretations that can hold his works.
“My photos are like Rorschach tests,” he said. “It is as if the teacher puts a picture in front of the class and it is how: what did you see? When you see environmental detachments, you see something from art history. When you see something, how technologically advanced, or strange way, how we do things that do.”
The great acceleration not only shows some of Burynsky’s professional works, but also shows less well-known pages of the photographer-es two pieces of his student days, a recording from a rarely seen series that he made about exploring the exploration of masculinity about taximity-work shops. Camera, and every now and then I would see a person and say: “Can I take your photo?” It has always been an recognition of the Sitter in her room and just a different way to show that these are things that people do, ”he said.
Burynsky hopes that shows like the great acceleration offer an opportunity to see a wider audience what is happening in the world. He is still doubtful how art is able to change our resources directly to use the use of governments and industry, but he believes that he is raising awareness and arousing curiosity. “Artists are soft, we are storytellers, we do not have the ability to influence or shape politics. We can increase awareness, take up our experience with the world and move it through the medium of our choice. I try to be a kind of management in what happens.”
