The unequal and adverse consequences of nature

 

Photographer Edward Burtynsky utilized his camera to showcase a different sector of today’s modernization, where the man-made ruins of post-industrialization have been distinctly visualized. With the incremental technological establishment, the priceless sacrifice that mother nature has endured has been showcased in this documentary, using polaroid pictures and short clips. Burtynsky is working in the long tradition of landscape representation within art history. The film reveals the consequences of globalization in the separation of production from consumption. As the real effects of anthropogenic climate change become increasingly impossible to ignore, the film displays the unequal and adverse consequences of nature transformed. Film and photography are both visual media, but ‘Manufactured Landscapes extend the element of time to emphasize the gravity of Burtynsky’s work. Pans, tableaux, and slow zoom-outs convey the sheer enormity of waste made by today’s human activity. 

This documentary triggered me the most as I belong from one of the developing countries, Bangladesh, where I have seen plenty of human-made devastating landscapes. The more I grew up, the more it used to bother me as I had no clue why the process of urbanization and globalization has to be such cruel. I hope the global leader would take the necessary steps to mitigate such damage before the mother-nature stops providing us with its blessings. For reference, just sharing an example of an existing scenario of a very important riverside of Dhaka, the Buriiganga River. 

  Buriganga river (before Industrialization)

                                                Buriganga river (After Industrialization)