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Photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose amazing work I’m familiar with from Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary Manufactured Landscapes, is interviewed by the Economist about his new book, Water, and the volume’s accompanying film, which he co-directed with Baichwal. Watch interview here.
From a new Venue interview with Edward Burtynsky, the brilliant photographer of industrial landscapes, a passage about learning self-editing:
“Burtynsky: I love the tones of browns and grays—I love more neutral tones. That’s why I like going to the desert and working in the desert. I find that green trees and things like that have a tendency to lock us into a certain way of seeing. When I look at green trees on a sunny day, I don’t know how to make an interesting picture of that. We’re familiar with that already.
Instead, I like the transparency that comes when leaves are off and you can look deeper into the landscape—you can look through the landscape. When I did try to make those kind of green-tree/sunny-day pictures, I’d find myself not ever putting them up and not ever using them. Eventually, I just said, well, I’m not going to take them anymore, because they never make it past the edit.
There’s a certain point where you learn from your own editing. You just stop taking certain pictures because they never make it through. Your editing starts to inform your thinking, as far as where you want to go and what you want to look for when you’re making a photograph.
That what’s different about me after thirty years of doing this kind of work—there are a lot of pictures I don’t have to take anymore. I think that’s called wisdom—learning what not to waste your time on!”
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Manufactured Landscapes, 2006:
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