Last month, Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky was speaking at the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco, proposing a 10.000-year gallery to go along with the Clock of the Long Now, as part of their Seminars About Long term Thinking. For those not familiar with the project, among many other endeavours, the foundation is planning to build a mechanical clock in a remote mountain site, designed by Danny Hillis, which will run for ten-thousand years along with a library. Practically all the foundation’s projects aim to provide counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking. The foundation’s work is very intriguing in the way that they undertake seemingly vast projects which in turn force their creators to radically re-think many of the notions of today’s processes as we are not used to long term thinking, which, as it becomes increasingly clear that our survival might depend on just that.
Back to Burtynsky, whose work has focused on the notion of globalization and received a lot of acclaim for his large-scale images of Chinese factories (with a mobile workforce currently in the range of 100 million people) and Bangladeshi ship-breaking yards. This he argues, “is the export of ideas from the west, unbolted and transported to China” to become the world’s factory. Which is consistent with the notion that his images are trying to connect us to the earlier ages of our industrial society-a world that still exists, but has been moved out of sight for many Westerners, which is why these photos today serve a particular role. From raped landscapes to massive crowds of migrant workers, the images are truly amazing.
