Toxic Picturesque

Reject pit, Iron mine, Minas Gerais

Sometimes referred to as ruin porn or aestheticised misery, photography that deals with the fragility of the planet and social life can possess the power to transform the appalling and apocalyptic into uncanny images of splendour. It is a criticism sometimes levelled at two of the masters of visual documentation; Edward Burtynsky and the Brasilian artist Sebastião Salgado. I have never quite been able to resolve my response to their work. When I first saw Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes (2006) on a large screen, I was uncomfortably mesmerised by the way industrialised landscapes of deformed nature, scarred earth and pauperised populations assumed a picturesque and epic quality. I was similarly moved by Salgado’s black and white photographs of the landless and rural poor in his book and exhibition Terra (1997). An enormous image of gold miners was projected on to the vast silver-oxide painted wall of a Glasgow warehouse. It was stunning and disturbing. The monochrome antlike bodies crawling up rickety ladders in a mud swamp hell assumed a monumental abstract graphic quality. It is a contradiction that is perhaps unavoidable. As soon as the shutter snaps and freezes social reality, the poisoned is rendered sublime, poverty is fetishised, and genocide becomes a postcard from the war front. In the same manner, the open cast mining landscapes of Brasil are transformed into otherworldly canvases of lush ochres, reds, rich browns, and silvers. Acid, mercury, and arsenic disfigure mineral surfaces, and in a blink of the eye, toxic radioactive earth hangs on a gallery wall.