Have you seen "Manufactured Landscapes"? This exhibition surveys a decade of photographic imagery exploring the subject of oil by Edward Burtynsky. In addition to revealing the rarely-seen mechanics of its manufacture, Burtynksy photographs the effects of oil on our lives, depicting landscapes altered by its extraction from the earth and by the cities and suburban sprawl generated around its use. He also addresses the coming "end of oil," as we confront its rising cost and dwindling availability. Burtynsky's photographs, printed at large scale, render his subjects with transfixing clarity of detail. His extensive exploration is organized thematically: aerial views of oil fields, the architecture of massive refineries, highway interchanges ribboning across the landscape, and motorculture aficionados at automotive events. Consisting of approximately 55 color landscapes, Edward Burtynsky: Oil will encompass a kind of modern-day "lifecycle" of the energy source that has shaped the modern world.
Nate Silver: Perhaps the only good thing about losing your job is that you no longer have to endure the drive to work.
Ed Burtynsky: I started to think: where is all this natural material going, where does it get formed into the products that we buy?
TED: Burtynsky is not much interested in micro: his focus is on vastness, on the scale of the environmental scars and transformations brought forth by industry, energy production and transportation. Nothing describes the scale and essence of today's globalized industry more tellingly than the opening scene: a seven-minutes tracking shot of the floor of a boundless Chinese factory, row after row after row of disciplined workers and efficient repetition that Stanley Kubrick could have filmed.
Stewart Brand: Burtynsky showed a large carbon transfer print of one of his ultra-high resolution photographs. The color and detail were perfect. Accelerated studies show that the print could hang in someone's living room for 500 years and show no loss of quality. Kept in the Clock's mountain in archival conditions it would remain unchanged for 10,000 years.
Burtynsky: Oil | Corcoran Gallery of Art | 
