Stunningly beautiful images of frightening scenes. Manufactured Landscapes follows Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky on his journey through China, where the cost of global progress is high.
Edward Burtynsky (1955) has been renowned as an industrial landscape photographer since the seventies. He is interested in landscapes shaped—or rather distorted, and often disfigured—by industrious people pursuing progress: mines, quarries, factories, office complexes, dams, and other large-scale human works.
Burtynsky is nowhere more at home than in the heart of industrialized China. During his journey through this economic powerhouse, he was joined by acclaimed director Jennifer Baichwal and equally celebrated cinematographer Peter Mettler, resulting in Manufactured Landscapes.
The award-winning documentary presents disturbing yet magnificent images: children playing on heaps of discarded computer parts, apocalyptic surroundings, conversations with bystanders, and footage of Burtynsky at work. Throughout, the photographer himself comments on the images calmly and sparingly.
To command the viewer’s attention from the outset, the documentary opens with a breathtaking eight-minute pan through an endless Chinese factory where underpaid young people work shifts of more than twelve hours.
Another striking sequence visits the controversial Three Gorges Dam, which was scheduled for completion in 2009 and was expected to become the largest structure of its kind.
Because the dam was intended to control the unpredictable Yangtze River and protect against flooding while supplying large parts of southern China with clean energy, its construction appeared more than justified. The downside of this vast project, however, was that entire cities and their millions of residents had to make way, while the environmental damage caused by construction was already impossible to foresee.
The trio also travels to the coast of Bangladesh, where impoverished workers dismantle discarded tankers with their bare hands under harrowing conditions in search of iron, steel, and copper. Shipbreaking was not an unfamiliar subject for Burtynsky; he had previously created the photo series Shipbreaking about dismantling decommissioned cargo ships lying on the beach like surreal yet toxic objects.
