Manufactured Landscape

I saw an amazing film yesterday: Manufactured Landscapes by Jennifer Baichwal, which follows photographer Edward Burtynsky as he records images of China's industrial landscapes. The images were astonishing, arresting, beautiful and frightening. The film begins with a panning shot through a kilometre-long factory floor, lasting several minutes. I found it a profoundly depressing film, because it implicated the viewer in the creation of these landscapes without judging and without proposing answers. They say it best on the film's site: "What makes the photographs so powerful is [Burtynsky's] refusal in them to be didactic. We are all implicated here, they tell us: there are no easy answers. The film continues this approach of presenting complexity, without trying to reach simplistic judgements or reductive resolutions." I left the cinema aware more than ever that our current political and economic model is totally unsustainable, without having a clue what to do about it personally.

(The film was funded in part by TV Ontario, so any of you who get TVO will probably get to see it eventually - not to be missed!)

Details: Minolta X-500, 50mm, exposure not recorded. Aberdeen, Hong Kong Island, April 1992. Placemark.