Imaging a Shattering Earth

Imaging a Shattering Earth- Three Takes

Colour and Beauty Trace Human Follies

-Agata B.

It was like watching an accident happening that you couldn't help prevent. It was also like staring at some beautifully composed and brilliantly coloured works of art in themselves. Yes, the two can meet, albeit a little uneasily.

Stark, dark and immobilizing, Imaging a Shattering Earth: Contemporary Photography and the Environmental Debate, recently shown at the National Art Gallery of Canada and curated by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography was not exactly a lighthearted date night excursion. It was a wrenching journey taking you through some of the world's most environmentally devastated landscapes, as seen through the lenses of photographers from around the world.

As I circled the galleries I let the truth of what all these pictures signified sink in. How many places had been damaged and undone of their naturalness, crisscrossed by the scars of our plunder, marked by toxic liquids, left to bear the weight of our excreta? This was only the tip of the iceberg, I reminded myself.

Affected by human activity and resource extraction, dug up, dumped upon, and in many cases left ghostly to its own devices when no longer viable or too toxic to manage, the Earth has taken much more than she should ever bear. How will she ever recover? Where will all these poisons go? How and will we ever be able to clean all this up?

Apart from the horrors that the images bore witness to, the real surprise and curiosity was how beautiful some of these photographs were to me.

I was stunned at how attracted I was to those rivulets of glowing toxic oranges in Jonathan Long's "Pre-Law Wastelands", the eerie etherality of noxious fumes rising from John Pfahl's smokestacks, the interesting lines and forms that the results of our furtive scraping at the Earth take when seen from far above, as in "Mining Exploration Near Carson City, Nevada" or "Aeration Pond, Toxic Water Treatment Facility, Pine Bluff, Arkansas" by Emmet Gowin. This man has an exceptional eye for light and shadow. "The Lake Project" by David Maisel was a series of three large square photos. Swirling colours that could very well have been painted onto canvas burst from very real satellite images showing Earth changes below brought about by mankind's folly.

One photograph, "Reclamation" really stirred me. It portrayed two men attempting to pull a thick carpet of grass back over a muddy, lifeless field in "The Guardian" series by the ParkeHarrison team. It was an image comprising death and sterility, effort, futility and wild hope all in the same glance. I needed to look at it longer, let the whole of its symbolism penetrate my mind. I allowed myself to relate to it- I too am scrambling to keep the grass from being pulled out from underneath me; I too am struggling to stretch it back to the way it used to be.

It was uneasy for me to contend with the conflicting emotions I felt as I wandered from picture to picture.

I am proud of this exhibit: proud of the motivations of the people who put it together. I am proud of the photographers who brought the dug out holes, the stinking smoke, discarded paintcans, industrial sludge and bags of garbage back to our doorsteps, forcing us to acknowledge and to confront the hidden hells we have created on the outskirts of our consciousness.

The Man In the Mirror, the Works of Our Hands

-Elise S.

This exhibit made me reflect on the paradox of beauty and toxicity. Many photographs were stunningly beautiful; it was only when I read the captions that I realized the ecological devastation witnessed in the images, whether it was that of an abandoned mine or a highly toxic landscape.

I started to think about how I witness the interplay of beauty and devastation in my life as an Ottawa resident. Why do people spray their lawns with hazardous chemicals, risking human and non-human health if not for an aesthetically pleasing turf? Why do people waste hundreds of litres of potable water (and the energy and chemicals involved in this process) to hose down driveways and cars or water their lawn at high noon? Individuals "clean" their homes and bodies with products that not only harm the environment but harm their own health, too. More than once, unfortunately, I've heard of people cutting down a tree simply because it cluttered their lawn.

Another example of this warped aesthetic came up in an article I recently read about Lake Lucille, a dead lake close to the home of American vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin. Although the lake is so polluted that it cannot sustain a fish population, the lake is still post-card beautiful and Palin has been photographed sitting in a rowboat on it, fishing rod in hand.

All of these examples make me wonder if this is how western society generally understands and values the environment. Is it solely as a scenic background, or a mere accessory to human activity? Are we so disconnected from the life-systems that sustains us?

The exhibit was thought-provoking, but not easy to take in. I think it is important to bear witness to the destruction of our environment and to the ways we are linked to devastation that is happening in seemingly far-off places. In this sense, the exhibit held up a mirror: this is us, humans. This is our species' work.

I would suggest to anyone who is interested and could not make it out to the exhibit to check out the documentary Manufactured Landscapes by Edward Burtynsky, an artist featured in the showing.

A Terrible Beauty

-Mike K.

I more or less expected the exhibit to be good, but I was not prepared for how good. A consistent theme was the paradoxical contrast between the desolation and destruction captured in the photographs and the vivid beauty of the colours, forms and textures depicted.

I liked almost all of the works, but some that stood out were Emmet Gowin's "Mining Exploration near Carson City", so evocative of a scarred, broken female body. Jonathan Long's, "Fall Colors" with its contrasts of form and colour. The strange majesty of John Pfahl's "O-Cel- O no.7", or the paradoxical feelings of hope and unbearable loneliness evoked by David McMillan's "Broken Tree." The feelings of futility and loss coupled with a sense of necessity and purpose that I saw in "Reclamation."

[HOTLINK http://www2.oakland.edu/shatteringearth/artists.cfm?Art=37&Pic=58&Gal=1]

and most particulary in "The Guardian"

[HOTLINK http://www2.oakland.edu/shatteringearth/artists.cfm?Art=37&Pic=57&Gal=1]

are still with me.

"All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born."

-William Butler Yeats Easter, 1916