December 19 & 26, 2016, Issue

Pick of the Issue (the “World Changers” issue) this week is Raffi Khatchadourian’s absorbing “The Long View,” a profile of landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky. The piece’s tagline is “Edward Burtynski’s quest to photograph a changing planet,” but Khatchadourian appears doubtful that that’s what Burtynsky is really up to. He writes, “In fact, throughout his career, Burtynsky has used his camera to create painterly abstractions as often as he has to create sublime imagery.” He says of Burtynsky’s “Nickel Tailings #34” and “Nickel Tailings #35,” “They appeared to be saying something forceful about the modern world, but with enough looking that forcefulness began to dissolve: was this a study in ultra-toxicity, or was it a benign terrain transformed by photographic sorcery?” That, for me, is the piece’s central question. Khatchadourian doesn’t resolve it. Instead, he calls Burtynsky’s photos “visual puzzles.”

“The Long View” follows Burtynsky on a phot0 shoot in Laos, Nigeria. Chaotic, complex Laos, home to twenty-one million people, is a great documentary subject. But, except for aerial shots, Burtynsky doesn’t capture it. Neither does Katchadourian. There are no inspired descriptions of the place that deliver us directly into the rub of things like the ones he wrote in his superb “A Century of Silence,” an account of his trip to Diyarbakir, in southwestern Turkey. “The Long View” reflects its subject, an abstractionist photographer who transforms industrial terrains into beautiful images drained of reality. Some of those images are undeniably ravishing: see, for example, "Saw Mills #1, Lagos, Nigeria 2016,” one of the illustrations accompanying Khatchadourian’s piece. But they don’t engage me. I don’t think they engage Khatchadourian, either. They’re missing a crucial element – human actuality.