'China has done what every other country has done: industrialize, get incredibly filthy, make money, then clean up and export the dirt to another country that hasn’t gone through the same process yet. The problem is that the scale is so much bigger in China and now it’s under pressure because every dirty industry in the world has been invited to set up there. There is a chance that whole zones will collapse before they will be able to deal with it. '

Edward Burtynsky is a renowned photographer who is primarily interested in the effect of human activity on landscape. His images are a catalogue of environmental destruction and exploitation; quarries, garbage dumps, oilfields, mines and so-on, which printed on large scale format create aesthetically beautiful and endlessly detailed fascinating images. This film follows Burtysnky around China and Bangladesh as he works on his book ‘Manufactured landscapes’ and serves as both a documentary on an artist’s work as well as a vehicle for Burtynsky’s ecological concerns.

Burtynsky visits factories, dams, recycling dumps, ship breaking yards and the towns about to be drowned by the three gorges dam project, the camera at a distance slowly and unemotionally surveying the scene. We see Burtynsky talking to local people, orchestrating the photoshoots and negotiating with local officials and at the end of each sequence we see the finished photographs. The tone of the film is purposefully slow and dispassionate. It avoids preaching but allows the individual to consider and interpret. The slow meditative tempo, hardly ever seen onscreen these days, defines the film: slow down, pause a little and think about what you are doing.

  "When you come to a town that's doing a burning of the boards, you can smell it a good 5-to-10 kilometers before you get there."

One of the most striking sequences is a visit to a Fujian town given over to the recycling of ‘e-waste’. The whole town is employed in breaking apart computer boards (50 percent of the world’s computers end up in China) and recycling the components. Cadmium and heavy metals have washed into the groundwater forcing the inhabitants to import water by truck. Yet the inhabitants continue to lead their lives apparently oblivious to the forces at play that shape their lives.

A foreign filmmaker in China highlighting these issues of exploitation, humanity, corporations and individuality has to tread carefully; does the film reinforce century’s old stereotypes by depicting Chinese workers as a subservient, soulless, and incomprehensibly foreign or is this the reality of industry in a rapidly developing country? It’s very hard to separate the history from a supposedly neutral viewpoint. Some scenes in the film leave unanswered questions: In one shot we see Burtynsky’s team handing out money to the people they have just photographed, does this compromise the ‘authenticity’ of the image? Or would it have been ripping-off the people not to have paid them? Was the striking image at the start of the film of thousands of yellow shirted workers artfully posed or was this part of the workers daily routine? The answer dramatically changes the interpretation of the image.

The dichotomy in Burtynsky’s work is that it illustrates the repulsiveness of ecological devastation in the form of fantastically beautiful images. The risk is that the viewer is seduced by the artistry and misses the message (“Doesn’t this mountain of discarded tyres look great on my wall”) yet the film successfully manoeuvres around this by always returning from the massive scale of change back to a human level.

Simon Crab