Museum Of Contemporary Photography Free Admission Friday

Free Admission Friday from 10am to 5pm at Museum of Contemporary Photography - see INFO below. In his efforts to reflect on the relationship of today's society with the environment Burtynsky builds on a long tradition of photographing the landscape and the human presence within it. In the nineteenth century, practitioners such as Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge photographed in remote locations, aiming to convey the sublime. As those photographers did, Burtynsky works with a large-format camera and his sizable, seductive photographs bring to mind their attempts to express the grandeur of the natural world and the feelings of awe that it could inspire. But Burtynsky puts pressure on the prospect of a modern-day sublime by seeking out, in his words, "subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning." His photographs register a restrained ambivalence, eschewing both a romantic notion of nature and an overtly political message. "These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence," Burtynsky states: "They search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear." The tension between the aesthetic appeal of the altered landscape and the ominous weight of human evidence in these photographs becomes a pivotal element. In this regard Burtynsky joins contemporaries such as Richard Misrach and David Maisel in using an attention to form and beauty as a means to bring humankind's effect on the environment into view. More Info below.