Burtynsky is a Canadian photographer and artist who is well known for his large-format photographs of industrial landscapes, which depict mans effect on nature which is why I'm referencing him within my project. His father worked on a production line at a local General Motors plant, and Burtynsky also used to play by the Welland Canal while watching the ships pass through the locks, this could've been where his inspiration for capturing the man-made affects on nature in his later photographs.
His images are usually taken from a high vantage point, which thus allows him to photograph a large area which begins to highlight the scale of the problem to his viewers. He uses a shock technique to impact the viewers by making his photographs really large, to show how bad our affect is on nature. Burtynsky uses a large format camera and gets to a high vantage point (sometimes he uses a helicopter) to allow him to photograph the scenery from a far, meaning his photographs sometimes capture a huge area of ground. His works are very ore inspiring, and remind me of artists such as Gursky's repetition pieces. Most of Burtynsky's works include lots of repetition, but which are found natural unlike Gursky's digitally enhanced images.
In particular I am looking into Burtynsky's project titled 'OIL', he started this project because as a landscape/environmental photographer "In 1997, It occurred to me that the vast, human-altered landscapes that I pursued and photographed over twenty years were only made possible by the discovery of oil..". He then traveled the world to document the effect of oil on all our lives, and to reveal the rarely seen mechanics of its production and distribution and ultimately where what it creates ends up at then end of its life, which is why I am looking into this. The detail he has achieved with his large format camera transfixes his audience to study these alien landscapes that the oil and waste industry has created.
I feel that these three images which capture a tire graveyard in America, make it feel to the viewer like the tires are rising out of the ground creating their own un-natural landscapes. I also got this feeling when I looked through my last set of images, in particular the photographs I took of the mountains of cars on top of each other.
These mountains of tires look as if they are rising out of the earth. Burtynsky has done well to capture images that shows the ridiculous scale of the problem that we have with waste in the 21st century. His images work as great inspiration for my project.
After getting more inspiration from the work of Edward Burtynsky and his project on Oil, I have decided that I will revisit the last scrapyard I photographed to produce images that connect to his work through scale and the use of repetition that he has shown through the capture of a multiple of one object.