Digital Commons@RISD Home > Division of Liberal Arts > Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive) > Vol. 21 (2023)
Abstract
Photographs bear witness. Minimally, they record or collect evidence. Bearing witness is not, however, reducible to showing that this was there then. Bearing witness has an affective dimension. What led a photographer to select this and not that to capture on a light sensitive medium? What was he or she feeling? How was the photographer embodied when he or she trained their lens on the scene to be photographed? How is the photographer’s embodiment culturally situated relative to that scene, and how does his or her embodiment bear on what he or she hopes to witness and for others to witness? This essay explores what Edward Burtynsky embodies and hopes to capture with the photographs collected for The Anthropocene Project. It argues that Burtynsky’s photographs embody and bear witness to a melancholia, a lost sense of unspoiled Nature felt in the presence of his photographs. It contends that this affect motivates audiences to mitigate the impact of human industry on the environment more effectively than ethical arguments about the responsibility of human industry to police its actions. The irony is that unspoiled Nature is a myth generated alongside the industry once mobilized to harvest its riches and now exposed in Burtynsky’s photographs as spoiling it.