Internationally renowned fine art photographers are a rare sight in Las Vegas.
With six honorary doctorates to his name, and a reputation for impassioned environmental advocacy, Canadian-born photo artist Edward Burtynsky is more celebrated than most. A , he has lectured at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. His latest one-man exhibition, Salt Pans, opened in London on Sept. 16, with the Guardian newspaper calling his imagery “beautiful, yet terrifying” and “jaw-droppingly epic.” Other major exhibitions of his work have appeared this year in Phoenix; San Jose, Calif.; Ontario, Canada — and at UNLV’s own Marjorie Barrick Museum.
This show is especially important because it is the first time that all Las Vegans — and not only those who have traveled to see Burtynsky in other cities — have been able to enjoy his enormous and incongruously lovely photographs of their own suburbs. Shot from a high angle and in painstakingly perfect detail, the houses lie in brown rows like a field of tiled prisms in front of the remote horizon. An urban lake looks violently blue.
But why? What made a Canadian photographer decide to shoot rooftops in Clark County?
He was engaged in his one of his self-appointed quests, a visual exploration of the relationship between human civilization and oil, a substance on which civilization has become increasingly dependent. Burtynsky calls 1997 the year of his "oil epiphany,” saying, "It occurred to me that the vast, human-altered landscapes that I pursued and photographed for over 20 years were only made possible by the discovery of oil.”
Over the next 12 years he traveled around the globe, organizing large-scale photo shoots in places as far apart as Utah and Azerbaijan. Edward Burtynsky: Oil opens with the image of an oil tanker anchored off the coast of Pasadena, Texas. It moves through pipelines and rigs. Las Vegas comes next, in a section of the chronology labeled Transportation and Motor Culture. Our suburbs have been hung next to freeways in Shanghai. Then there is The End of Oil, where barefoot workers in Bangladesh are dismantling obsolete models of the same tanker we saw in Texas.
Visitors to the Barrick Museum have reacted with strong emotions to the show. One person who had recently retired after a career in recycling went in search of the museum’s interim director so that he could talk about the industrial shredder that must have been waiting for a heap of discarded engines that almost overwhelms one of the frames. A journalist from the Review-Journal suggested that a pile of old tires bore an uncanny resemblance to human bodies.
This portrait of a world united by oil is compelling without being didactic. It is a triumph, not only esthetically but also as a spectacle of planning and determination. Getting permission to shoot in such off-limits places as the state-owned oil fields of former Soviet republics was not easy.
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D.K. Sole has worked at UNLV's Marjorie Barrick Museum since it changed its focus from natural history to fine art in 2012. An artist and former resident of Melbourne, Australia, she held her first one-woman Las Vegas show in 2015. Until recently she co-managed the highly praised downtown gallery, Satellite Contemporary.
