The statistics behind Edward Burtynsky's photos are as alarming as his photos are beautiful.
For several years the internationally known Canadian photographer has turned his attention to water, a profoundly endangered resource too often taken for granted. His previous studies of oil, China and industrial landscapes are featured in more than 50 museum collections around the world, including the national galleries of Canada and the United States.
Sixteen of Burtynsky's mural-sized color images are on view through June 27 at Weinstein Gallery in south Minneapolis. With their grand scale, rich colors and almost abstract compositions, they are mesmerizingly beautiful accounts of humanity's uses and abuses of water.
The show includes a continuous screening of "Watermark," a 90-minute video by Jennifer Baichwal and Nick de Pencier, who accompanied Burtynsky to many sites. His research and musings are encapsuled also in a handsome 2013 book, "Water" (Steidl, $100), which includes about 100 photos and pithy summaries of water issues worldwide. His locales and topics extend from the Netherlands, which began reclaiming land from the sea as early as 100 B.C., to China, which at one point after the 1950s was building, on average, 600 dams per year.
Working in nine countries, he photographed mostly from small planes and helicopters. Subjects in this exhibit range from Icelandic rivers that apparently flow through landscapes of molten lava to turquoise geothermal ponds and salt pools in Sonora, Mexico, an ancient "stepwell" in Rajasthan, India, oil-drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico and surrealistic phosphor ponds in Florida.
Seductive beauty
With a keen eye for composition, Burtynsky infuses many of his images with disarmingly artful designs. Three large pictures of "Pivot Irrigation" plots in Arizona and the Texas Panhandle, for example, are such beautiful abstractions they lull you into admiration despite their bleak implications.
The most shocking is "Suburb, South of Yuma, Arizona," a 2011 aerial view of a desert grid so flat and blond it looks like a gargantuan linoleum-tiled kitchen floor stretching to infinity. What would be grout lines on a floor are roadways slicing the sand into vast squares. Houses dot the foreground square, each surrounded by its own vacant sandbox. Nearby, however, are mile-wide circles of greenery nurtured by "pivot irrigation" that disburses water through arms rotating around a central point. Though pretty and productive, pivot plots are extremely problematic because their water comes from the Ogallala Aquifer, a 3-million-year-old geological formation that has been drained by 10 percent in just the past 60 years.
Not everything is dire. "Rice Terraces #3, Western Yunnan Province, China" is a lyrical image of tiny water plots stepping across an undulating landscape punctuated by an outcropping of trees and mossy ledges. Cultivated for more than 2,000 years, the traditional plots support fish, shrimp and frogs in the rainy season and rice later, a biodynamic exchange that naturally renews the soil in response to seasonal cycles.
Elsewhere, however, a dramatic picture of brilliant yellow "Canola Fields," punctuated with black cones that are the remains of terraces, shows how industrial agriculture is ravaging other parts of Yunnan province.
Poetry without moralizing
California's 15-year drought is in the news again as the state debates water rationing, farmers lose crops and reservoirs dry up, as seen in "Shasta Lake Reservoir, Northern California," a 2009 photo of the artificial lake created by damming the Sacramento River in 1945. The lake's shores once lapped patches of forest that now perch like ill-fitting toupees atop bald cliffs.
But even dubious dams can produce spectacular beauty as seen in "Xiaolangdi Dam #4," Burtynsky's dramatic 2011 vista of the Yellow River exploding from a dam in Henan Province, China. Nearly 7 feet wide and 5 feet tall, the photo looks like a Turner watercolor executed by a Chinese calligrapher. A tumultuous mist of taupe vapor, it documents an annual ritual in which silt and rocks that build up behind the dam are expelled to prevent the dam's turbines from malfunctioning.
The tension between the beauty of Burtynsky's images and their often distressing back stories adds to their fascination. Throughout, the gallery wisely avoids moralizing and leaves the stories to be discovered through the film, the artist's website or his book.
mary.abbe@startribune.com • 612-673-4431
