Beauty in The Beast

Burtynsky works mostly with a 4-x-5 camera, the kind you mount on a tripod and stare through with a cape over your head. It's a complicated contraption and not easily portable. He generally totes about 150 pounds worth of gear to every shoot.

First, he has to hunt for sites to photograph. That can take months. He often hires assistants to scout locations and negotiate access. Getting on the premises frequently takes persistence and diplomacy. The Chinese, however, were positively eager to show off those factories. Floor managers even helped out when it came time to shoot the Deda plant. A foreman shut down the conveyer belt and at Burtynsky's signal, told all the workers to freeze.

"I had to keep the shutter open for two seconds and if people were moving the image would be slurred," he says. "I'd count to 10 and usually by the time I reached six, they had stilled themselves."

Once he's found a locale and good light, his methods are so painstaking they border on compulsive. He often will shoot an image on three or four different brands of film, then print each image on three or four different brands of paper. He winds up with a visual smorgasbord, then chooses the combination that produces the richest and most vivid look.

All of this effort and machinery seem to appeal to the equipment geek in Burtynsky. Noah Weinzweig, his translator and all-purpose aide in China, recounts the day that the two of them were detained by the cops in Shanghai, for allegedly shooting in a neighborhood where that wasn't permitted.

"They tell us to go back to the hotel and bring all our equipment to the police station," Weinzweig says. "I'm getting a little nervous. Ed doesn't speak Chinese so he's bored, and while we're waiting in the police station, he starts looking at his camera and he discovers some function on it that he never knew about. This gets him excited beyond belief. He's like, 'Look, Noah, this is fantastic!' Meanwhile, the cops are figuring out what to do with us. I said, 'Ed, can we talk about this later?' "

No Anger

The more you know about Burtynsky's life, the more surprising the apparent neutrality of his photography seems. His father, a Ukrainian immigrant, worked for years at a GM factory in the industrial town of St. Catherines, Ontario, and died of cancer at the age of 45. Years later, Burtynsky landed a job at the same place. Management had just concluded that a lubricating oil used for decades was carcinogenic. Burtynsky and other newcomers spent months cleaning up the plant, wearing protective masks and slathered in special creams, while all of the longtime employees worked day after day pretty much coated in the oil.

"I met one guy who remembered my dad," Burtynsky recalls. "He said, 'Oh yeah, they all died young.' It turned out that very few of them lived past 50."

So where is the anger? Aren't you entitled to some artistic evidence of a grudge?

"Well, my dad and I weren't getting along very well when we parted ways, so to speak," he says. "So maybe what I feel more than anger is guilt. But I've always felt like if I said 'This is bad,' there is only one question to ask about my work and that is, do you agree with me or not? I don't think my photographs are neutral but they do allow a multiplicity of meanings."

Some of his photographs could be slapped on the front of a corporate annual report, as Burtynsky himself has noted. Which gets to one possible rap against his portfolio -- that it prettifies the terrible. Burtynsky calls his images "a second look at the scale of what we call progress," and hopes that at minimum, the images acquaint viewers with the ramifications -- he avoids the word price -- of our lifestyle. But what if viewers just see, you know, some dudes and a ship?

"Another photographer might focus on the loss of life or pollution," acknowledges Kennel of the National Gallery. "He uses beauty as a way to draw attention to something. It's a very particular strategy."

He started shooting at the age of 11, after his father bought cameras and darkroom equipment from a widow selling off her husband's gear. The Burtynskys set up in the basement of their home, mixing the chemicals using a how-to guide. The next day, Edward shot some pictures of his dog playing in the snow and developed the images that night.

"For me, it was transforming," he says of that moment. When his dad declined to fund the growing expense of all the printing paper and film, Burtynsky started selling photos of people at events at a local community center. A 5-by-7-inch photo cost 75 cents. He pocketed enough to keep snapping.

He later earned a degree at one of Canada's most prestigious art schools, then began to search for an organizing theme for his photographs. A government grant or two later, he realized that few people had any notion of where their stuff -- their cars, phones, and so on -- came from, or ultimately wound up.

"Everybody in North America has talked on the copper lines that came out of this mine," Burtynsky says, pointing to "Mines #22, Kennecott Copper Mine, Bingham Valley, Utah." The mine is a mile deep and shaped like a Roman amphitheater with seating for millions, though there's a pool of glowing green liquid where the Romans would put a stage.

"We all partake of what comes from this place, but we have no idea what it looks like."