Edward Burtynsky's photos raise moral and aesthetic questions

Watching Jennifer Baichwal’s 2006 documentary on the works of the photographer Edward Burtynsky, Manufactured Landscapes, you can’t help but look with astonishment and wonder at his photographs of industrial production, waste, and effulgence; you can’t help but feel that these are astonishing and even beautiful photographs – and then of course you feel guilt and remorse for even thinking that these scenes can have aesthetic value. On the one hand, these are documentary records of the pain and suffering so many suffer and endure; on the other hand, EB has found a formal beauty in some of these haunting photographs. Yes, you can’t help but look at the volcanic pyramids of coal waste, as the military precision of a Chinese manufacturing super-factory, at the cities crushed to ruin to make way for the Three Gorges Dam in China, at the eerie hulks of scrapped cargo ships broken down to shreds of steel in a dockyard in Bangladesh. But all of these “manufactured landscapes” include the people who live and work within – often with the jobs of the most mind-numbing tedium or the most lethal danger, and with no notable protection from injury. So through these photographs (and at the documentary showing how EB made them) EB is raising our awareness of several global crises: industrial pollution, worker safety and exploitation, lives uprooted to make way for “progress.” His intentions are impeccable. Yet what does it mean for us to look at these photos in a museum or gallery? If we see the photos and treat them as works of art, as pieces of aesthetic beauty, are we guilty? Have we been conned? Are EB and Baichwal exploiting those whole live and work in these landscapes, by mining their suffering for voyeurs like us?