Shipbreaking #13, Chittagong, Bangladesh 2000

Edward Burtynsky made this photograph in Bangladesh, likely using a large format camera. The color palette is muted: grays and browns dominate, and the sky is an ominous light pink. I can imagine Burtynsky carefully composing the scene, trying to make sense of the scale of the ship graveyards, knowing that a picture could never really capture it all. The details of the metal are important here. See how the light hits the broken edges? How the material, thick and heavy, seems to ooze into the ground like thick paint? His pictures are a bit like abstract painting, but with real stuff. I’m reminded of some of Anselm Kiefer's landscapes, or even some of the more desolate paintings by Caspar David Friedrich. Artists are always looking to each other across time, and this picture asks us to really look at the world around us in a new way. They all show how the earth is marked and changed by industry, progress, and us.