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Michael Truscello\u00a0| Mount Royal University<\/p>\n
The New Topographics, Dark Ecology, and the Energy Infrastructure of Nations:
\nConsidering Agency in the Photographs of Edward Burtynsky and Mitch Epstein from a Post-Anarchist Perspective<\/h4>\n
[I]t is certain that the state itself needs a hydraulic science\u2026 But it needs it in a very different form, because the State needs to subordinate hydraulic force to conduits, pipes, embankments, which prevent turbulence, which constrain movement to go from one point to another, and space itself to be striated and measured, which makes the fluid depend on the solid, and flows proceed by parallel, laminar layers. (Deleuze and Guattari 363)<\/p>\n
Empires have a way of coming to an end, leaving behind their landscapes as relics and ruins. (Mitchell 19)<\/p>\n
The New Topographics<\/h4>\n
The New Topographics movement in photography\u2014made famous by the New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape<\/em> exhibit at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York in October 1975\u2014broke with the traditional landscape photography of Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter to frame the post-war industrialization of America in aesthetic terms \u201cmarked by repetition and isolation,\u201d the disappearance of community \u201cin an atmosphere of vacant alienation\u201d defined by suburban sprawl, and a \u201ccelebration of directness, emotional remove, and attentiveness to humanity\u2019s shaping of the land\u201d (Rohrbach xiv). Curator William Jenkins included in the famous exhibit (reproduced in 2009) photographers Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr.. Decades after the seminal exhibit, the New Topographics aesthetic is being reassessed by scholars, and the aesthetic itself remains relevant; for example, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago hosted an exhibit called \u201cPublic Works,\u201d which examined contemporary built infrastructure, in the summer of 2011. Above all, and perhaps concomitant with post-1968 cultural theorists who emphasized the micropolitics of everyday life, the New Topographics photographers demonstrated an appreciation for \u201cthe altered environments of daily life,\u201d something Finis Dunaway sees as \u201ccontributing to ecological citizenship by encouraging viewers to form attachments to a broader continuum of sites\u201d (Dunaway 42).<\/p>\n Contrary to earlier forms of landscape photography that situated nature as pristine and untouched by human development, the New Topographics engaged American landscapes as the scarred and decaying byproducts of capitalist exploitation, often vacant spaces for automobility such as parking lots, highways, or gas stations, as in the work of Robert Adams, indicating \u201cthe new West\u2019s utter dependence upon petroleum and private transportation\u201d (Dunaway 27). The Rochester exhibit\u2019s \u201cjuxtaposition of abandoned, new, and incomplete structures instills the human-altered landscape with a sense of built-in obsolescence and distinguishes its rapid growth from the natural environment in which it is situated\u201d (Foster-Rice 53). Whether borrowing aesthetic inspiration from commercial real estate photography (Salvesen 81) or aerial photography (Sichel 87), the New Topographics was a photographic style commonly interpreted as apolitical, due to its \u201cflatness, dehumanization, and deception of scale\u201d (Sichel 94). The same complaint has been levied against Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose manufactured landscapes seem to avoid explicit commentary on the industrial alterations they depict, and often seem to beautify industrial waste and human devastation.<\/p>\n In her review of Burtynsky\u2019s Manufactured Landscapes<\/em>, Nadia Bozak writes, \u201cBecause Burtynsky systematically aestheticizes industrial civilization\u2019s environmental incursions, his images are marked with an almost insentient detachment and lack of critical positioning that can be troubling\u201d (68). Jonathan Bordo asks, \u201cDoes such beautification sooth irremediable loss by making human interventions appear like inevitable natural facts?\u201d (94). This essential tension between ecological catastrophe and aesthetic beauty becomes the central dilemma for most viewers of Burtynsky\u2019s photographs, what Bordo characterizes as \u201can ambiguous situation of pondering pictures of ecological devastation while beholding dazzling visual surfaces\u201d (91). Burtynsky\u2019s aesthetic and the New Topographic aesthetic from which it derives, I argue, should not be seen as apolitical, but rather as traces of an empire in ruins and a sociality to come; that is, by employing a post-anarchist analysis, I demonstrate how Burtynsky\u2019s photographs in his recent collection OIL<\/em>, and Mitch Epstein\u2019s images from American Power<\/em>, produce an aesthetic of what Yves Abrioux calls \u201cintensive landscaping,\u201d or \u201clandscaping as style, as the promise of a social spacing yet to come\u201d (264). What Burtynsky and Epstein accomplish in their photographs related to energy in particular is \u201cto invent relations, rather than assert ideological or cultural control\u201d (Abrioux 264). In Burtynsky specifically, the place of energy extraction and transport becomes not a self-contained striation of ecological degradation, but a \u201cplace of passage,\u201d to use Deleuze and Guattari\u2019s terminology, a depiction of wildness and civilization in contact, assembled and reformulating the landscape into something other. Burtynsky himself described the ambivalence of his images:<\/p>\n I think that\u2019s the duality. I think that\u2019s what makes the images unstable. I think that\u2019s what makes them interesting that they\u2019re not kind of used as indictments. . . . Their meaning is not fixed and I think in most really interesting art which does touch upon political bends or whatever. Fixing the meaning then also takes that work and locates it directly in a particular time and so it really doesn\u2019t migrate very well into the future once that is considered no longer a threat or an issue, so dies the work. (\u201cThoughts on Oil\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It is obvious to observers of Burtynsky\u2019s photographs that they catalogue ecological devastation. What is often perceived as a beautification of this devastation might also be considered a rhizomatic depiction of an always-incomplete process of becoming post-empire, post-capital, and post-natural; the industrial revolution, after all, \u201cfuelled by coal, oil and gas has resulted in a level of landscape change that is\u2014in both its nature and magnitude\u2014unprecedented in the history of humankind\u201d (Nada\u0457 and van der Horst 144). The ambivalence provoked by these photos signifies the death of conventional landscape photography and its ossified understanding of nature as a static, pristine construct, a representational form passing into something else. Burtynsky and Epstein depict a post-anarchist associationalism in place of State modalities of capture and striation, while foregrounding the energy relationships that shape landscapes as the sun sets on the suicidal State.<\/p>\n What is especially compelling about Burtynsky\u2019s vision of State capture and striation is that it perceives this passage from the \u201cdistant vision\u201d of a State, unlike some \u201cenvironmentalist\u201d framing of ecological devastation, which often sees \u201capparatuses of capture\u201d from the vantage of what Deleuze and Guattari call the \u201cclose-range\u201d (492) vision of smooth space. That is, Burtynsky\u2019s photographs see State modalities \u201clike a State,\u201d like the cadastral maps that produced the \u201csynoptic view of the state\u201d (Scott 39), and this perspective is unnerving for many viewers, especially those who do not identify with the optical space of the State. Absent are the intimate portraits of oil-soaked birds, dislocated indigenous communities, or tattered corpses that normally signify in the visual register of the social justice jeremiad the criminal machinations of Big Oil. Instead of witnessing industrial evisceration from the intimate space of the indignant observer, Burtynsky complicates the observer\u2019s relationship to agency in the Age of Oil by foregrounding the scale, technological complexity, and almost mythical ubiquity of petroculture. Absent is the bilateralism of earnest environmental portraiture, the simplistic agential dualism that pits \u2018people\u2019 against Big Oil. Instead, Burtynsky offers a vision of a distributed agency, in which the \u201cunstable cascade\u201d (Bennett 457) of intentionalities resists a linear cause and effect in favour of depicting objects produced by flows of energy, material combinations, and \u201cthe conjoined effect of a variety of kinds of bodies\u201d (454), an ontological reality that seems particularly noteworthy for industrial nations built on vast and complex technological infrastructures with extensive historical, political and environmental legacies.<\/p>\n The modern State form co-evolved with the material capacities of infrastructure, massive hydraulic processes that could generate and transfer electricity, excavate waste, and couple mobility with communication. \u201cBetween 1880 and 1950 modern nation states emerged as great territorial \u2018containers\u2019 with growing powers over many domains,\u201d note Graham and Marvin (73). Within this context, infrastructure was widely perceived as the cohesive assemblage for a sense of national identity, and \u201cinfrastructure policies were the central way in which national states engaged in shaping capitalist territorial organization\u201d (74). Some of the most notable infrastructure projects of this period include \u201cthe Nazis\u2019 Autobahn<\/em> network, the electrification of the Ukraine and the Soviet Union, the New Deal regional projects of the Tennessee Valley and the national highway programme in the United States\u201d (77). These historical touchstones conform to Deleuze and Guattari\u2019s definition of State territorialization:<\/p>\n One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated space. It is a vital concern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and, more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire \u201cexterior,\u201d over all the flows traversing the ecumenon. If it can help it, the State does not dissociate itself from a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital, etc. There is still a need for fixed paths in well-defined directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativise movement, and measure in detail the relative movements of subjects and objects. (Deleuze and Guattari 385-386)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n James C. Scott traces this striation of space in early modern Europe primarily in the form of cadastral maps used for the segregation and taxation of land, among other State functions, in his book Seeing Like A State<\/em>. Beginning with German scientific forestry, in which the \u201cuniform forest was intended to facilitate management and extraction\u201d (18), Scott demonstrates the translation of the State\u2019s synoptic vision from forestry to other forms of striation including taxation.<\/p>\n For the purposes of taxation and conscription, and in conjunction with the emergence of the modern State, cadastral maps translated the complexity of phenomenal flows into simplistic abstractions, becoming, to use Mark Halsey\u2019s phrase from another context, \u201ca machine of axiomisation,\u201d something that \u201cexpunges the world of pre-formed things, the world of haecceities, the world composed only of rhythms and of bodies without organs, and in its place substitutes the certainties of Royal science and (il)logics of capital\u201d (Halsey para. 12). Scott writes:<\/p>\n The crowning artifact of this almighty simplification is the cadastral map. Created by trained surveyors and mapped to a given scale, the cadastral map is a more or less complete and accurate survey of all landholdings\u2026. The cadastral map and property register are to the taxation of land as the maps of tables of the scientific forester were to the fiscal exploitation of the forest. (Scott 36)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The cadastral map, this \u201cmachine of axiomisation\u201d or modality of State capture, not only \u201cignored anything lying outside its sharply defined field of vision\u201d (Scott 47), it also produced a specific aesthetic: \u201cThe visual sign of the well-managed forest, in Germany and in the many settings where German scientific forestry took hold, came to be the regularity and neatness of its appearance\u201d (18). Similar to the symmetry and synthetic appearance of the managed forest, landscapes under the synoptic vision of cadastral maps exhibit a quilted calculus primarily visible from an elevated vantage, \u201ca God\u2019s-eye view, or the view of an absolute ruler\u201d (57). The reconstruction of Paris by Baron Haussmann from 1853 to 1869 exhibited the same logic as the scientific management of old-growth forests, and in the city \u201cthe aboveground order\u2026 facilitates its underground order in the layout of water pipes, storm drains, sewers, electric cables, natural gas lines, and subways\u2014an order no less important to the administration of a city\u201d (56-57). Thus, submersed infrastructure functions as a supplementary force of relations with \u2018aboveground\u2019 striations, the repressed material strata of the flan<\/em>\u00ea<\/em>ur<\/em>.<\/p>\n I began to think about oil itself: as both the source of energy that makes everything possible, and as a source of dread, for its ongoing endangerment of our habitat. (Burtynsky, OIL)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Fig. 1 \u00a0Edward Burtynsky, Oil Fields #22<\/em>, Cold Lake, Alberta, Canada, 2001<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cThe cadastral map is very much like a still photograph of the current in a river,\u201d writes Scott (46), using a simile that effectively expresses the paradox of Burtynsky\u2019s photography about oil. The cadastral map captures innumerable social processes in a state of becoming and occludes their very transitive properties for the administrative logic of the State. Burtynsky\u2019s photographs often provide a sense of stasis where enormous sociotechnical apparatuses are operating in conjunctural tension. A perfect example of this is Oil Fields #22<\/em> (Fig. 1), taken near Cold Lake, Alberta. The image, which opens his OIL<\/em> collection, captures pipelines parsing a forest in a nondescript patch of wilderness. The aboveground pipelines travel from outside the left frame to beyond the horizon near the centre of the image, in a winding path that evokes the natural contours of a river rather than the mechanical trajectory of something constructed. And yet this river of oil is still, the trees are erect as if there is no wind, and, typical of Burtynsky and the New Topographics, no human activity is visible. Despite an enormous flow of oil across the landscape, we detect no motion at all. The effect resembles what Shannon and Smets suggest should be the architectural ambition of infrastructure, a blending of landscape and infrastructure: \u201cOnce married with architecture, mobility, and landscape, infrastructure can more meaningfully integrate territories, reduce marginalization and segregation, and stimulate new forms of interaction. It can then truly become \u2018landscape\u2019\u201d (Shannon and Smets 9). Their understanding of the future of infrastructure is not to reduce the amount of it, but rather to integrate it with landscape in such a way that the two become a newly marked assemblage of \u2018landscape\u2019 proper; Burtynsky\u2019s Oil Fields #27<\/em> (Fig. 2) accomplishes something like this effect, in which the latticework of oil infrastructure is scarcely discernible from the rolling hills of Bakersfield, California.<\/p>\n Fig. 2 \u00a0Edward Burtynsky, Oil Fields #27, Bakersfield, California, USA, 2004<\/em><\/p>\n To \u201creduce marginalization and segregation\u201d sounds equally egalitarian and possessed of the same sameness that drives the administering arm of the synoptic State. \u201cLandscape and infrastructure merge and movement corridors are (re)worked as new vessels of collective life,\u201d in the words of Shanon and Smets (9). An image such as Oil Fields #22<\/em> seems to take this approach to the oil pipelines, at least in the absence of more obvious indicators of critique, and one could therefore imagine this picture on the wall of an oil industry executive\u2019s office, as easy as one could imagine it hanging in the same room as the most ardent Greenpeace activists.<\/p>\n The stasis of the oil delivery apparatus and its river-like curvature connote ambivalence about what is really happening<\/em>, an ambivalence registered above by the reviewers of Burtynsky\u2019s work. We could note, for example, that the more than 370,000 km of pipelines in Alberta present a number of significant threats to the provincial environment: potential contamination of land and water from spills; loss and fragmentation of wildlife habitat and natural vegetation; loss and compaction of soils; reduced availability of agricultural, prairie and forested areas; loss of historical resources such as archeological sites; and stream sedimentation (Government of Alberta). At the same time, oil is implicated in a host of social benefits (medical advances, certain forms of mobility, warmth, agricultural production, etc.) and devastation (militarism, pollution, toxification of water and soil, agriculture\u2014again, etc.), and complex, distributed forms of agency make it difficult to create a binary division of sinners and saints, malevolent demand and benevolent supply, those who are solely responsible for the petrocultural apparatus and those stand entirely outside of it. Most notably absent from Burtynsky\u2019s oil images, and yet most aggressively affected by capitalist resource extraction, are the First Nations communities of Northern Alberta. This absence contributes to the ambivalent tone of his photographs, by visually displacing the most obviously aggrieved subjects of oil capitalism; their presence would make it easier for viewers to identify a political trajectory of accusation. But such a trajectory would also ignore the distribution of complicity with the atrocities of oil capitalism. By expanding our understanding of distributed human and non-human agencies in \u201cpetromodernity\u201d (LeManager, \u201cThe Aesthetics of Petroleum\u201d 60), we can better recognize the shifting intensities of petrocultural assemblages.<\/p>\n The juxtaposition of the forest and the pipelines in Oil Fields #22<\/em> recalls what Deleuze and Guattari famously described as the rhizomatic multiplicity that contrasted with the hierarchical structure of the tree, associated with what they called arborescent thought\u2014\u201cthought, which like a tree, judges the world from one fixed point (roots, Descartean rationality), or requires that thinking proceed in only one direction (scientifically, dialectically)\u201d (Halsey para. 1). Burtynsky\u2019s collection OIL<\/em> thus begins with an image of trees, a metaphor used by Deleuze and Guattari to describe arborescent thought. However, the structure of the pipeline system has also been compared with a tree:<\/p>\n The pipeline system is organized like a tree. Small collector pipelines in the oil field, called flow lines, are the fine roots of the system. They gather crude oil from many wells and bring it to the field processing station. Somewhat larger pipes carry the oil to the terminus of a main-line pipeline, which supplies refineries hundreds of miles away; this is the trunk of the tree. The products of the refinery are then distributed through another system of main-line pipes, which divide into smaller and smaller branches until they reach distribution depots\u2014the leaves of the tree. (Hayes 162)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The entire apparatus of oil extraction, refinement, and distribution perfectly encapsulates the hydraulic science of the State, its hierarchical, arborescent thought that captures flows in a constant struggle with rhizomatic, open multiplicities. Burtynsky\u2019s OIL<\/em> begins not with an image of oil extraction or combustion, but with an image of trees and a tree-like system of pipelines, the image of Royal science, arborescent thought.<\/p>\n Fig. 3 Edward Burtynsky, Oil Fields #19a, Belridge, California, USA, 2003<\/em><\/p>\n The rows of \u201cnodding donkey\u201d oil wells in Belridge, California, depicted from an oblique angle in Burtynsky\u2019s Oil Fields #19a<\/em> (Fig. 3), could easily be mistaken for an abandoned oil patch, if not for the two devices in the foreground visibly blurred because they are operating. Much like the pipelines in Oil Fields #22<\/em>, the wells depicted in Oil Fields #19a<\/em> encode the ambiguous agencies of modern industrial infrastructure. The oblique angle separates the image from the conventional geometry of the cadastral map, but only the two wells in the foreground appear to be moving. No humans are visible. Is this a dried up oil patch, or the beating heart of the industrial society? Burtynsky allows the viewer to contemplate the space of passage between the two, between the dying empire and the vision of sociality to come, by isolating the materiality of petroculture from a detached and distant perspective. Instead of bisecting a forest, which might commonly connote forms of biodiversity, the wells depicted here are located in the desert, a landscape frequently associated with hostility to life, and, in the context of oil, with the crude oil deposits of the Middle East. A combination of elements in this image suggests psychological tension and alienation: the oblique angle, god\u2019s-eye view, desert setting, and absence of human activity. Burtynsky\u2019s familiar use of the horizon intimates a mythological scale of production. But where are the people who use the oil, and to what ends do they use it? Is this particular striation of oil wells and transformers, pipes and storage tanks, the beginning or the end of agency, the source of combustible mobility, long distance communication, and petroleum-based cultural products, or the mechanical moans and sighs of an empire reaching exhaustion? Burtynsky does not tell us. Burtynsky described this picture to the CBC, in terms that reflect the associationalist perspective for which I have been arguing: \u201cIt\u2019s a mosquito drawing blood. It\u2019s like we have these pipes into the ground sucking it out and we never really get a chance to see very much of the material itself, but each one of us is almost using it every day\u201d (\u201cThoughts on Oil\u201d).<\/p>\n To understand the materiality of agency in Burtynsky\u2019s photography, we can summon the observations of the \u2018new materialisms\u2019 of political theorists such as Jane Bennett, Diana Coole, and Timothy W. Luke, and of critical urbanists including Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin. Prominent strands of materialist cultural studies and urban studies employ the concept of \u201cassemblage\u201d (Anderson and McFarlane 2011; Deleuze and Guattari 1987; McFarlane 2011) in order to understand the distributed agency of urban infrastructure, which is often obscured either by its relative invisibility or by the anthropocentrism of cultural theory. As Jane Bennett writes, \u201cThere was never a time when human agency was anything other than an interfolding network of humanity and nonhumanity. What is perhaps different today is that the higher degree of infrastructural and technological complexity has rendered this harder to deny\u201d (463). Oil pipeline or well assemblages, in this context, should not be studied as just the material product of oil company intentions, nor should their construction be understood as either the victory of an oil company or the loss of community resistance (the popular media framing of pipeline debates). Rather, cultural critics need to examine the \u201cunstable cascade\u201d (Bennett 457) of intentionalities, flows of energy, material combinations, and \u201cthe conjoined effect of a variety of kinds of bodies\u201d (454) that are contained within the mass structures of petrocultural landscapes. Assessing the distributed agency of petrocultural assemblages is not an act of becoming an apologist for environmental degradation or colonial racism, but instead recognizes that individuals are \u201csimply incapable of bearing full<\/em> responsibility for their effects\u201d (463). Burtynsky\u2019s photography, I wish to suggest, is particularly useful for encouraging a discussion of agency in this manner.<\/p>\n Fig. 4 \u00a0Edward Burtynsky, Oil Refineries #34<\/em>, Houston, Texas, USA, 2004<\/em>.<\/p>\n Oil pipelines are but one aspect of oil extraction, transport and use, but they connect the environmental, cultural and health impacts of oil exploration, drilling and extraction with the assemblages of oil transport, refining, and consumption. The spillage of oil is not always the most devastating effect of this process: \u201cThe physical alteration of environments from exploration, drilling, and extraction can be greater than from a large oil spill\u201d (O\u2019Rourke and Connolly 594). Oil refineries, such as the one from Texas depicted in Burtynsky\u2019s Oil Refineries #34<\/em> (Fig. 4), \u201cproduce huge volumes of air, water, solid, and hazardous waste, including toxic substances such as benzene, heavy metals, hydrogen sulfide, acid gases, mercury, and dioxin\u201d (603). The oil and gas industry in the United States creates more solid and liquid waste \u201cthan all other categories of municipal, agricultural, mining, and industrial wastes combined\u201d (594). The transport of oil from its place of extraction occurs by supertankers, barges, trucks, and pipelines; there are now \u201cmore miles of oil pipelines in the world than railroads\u201d (598). Typically, these pipelines have \u201ccaused disproportionate impacts on low-income and minority communities in the United States and been connected to human rights violations around the world\u201d (602). In other words, perhaps we could view what often lies within Burtynsky\u2019s frame as an invitation to contemplate the many associations beyond the frame; in the case of his photographs about oil, the pipelines, wells, and refineries represent passages, associations, transfers of energy beyond the frame. Burtynsky\u2019s images do not neglect social, psychological and environmental devastation, so much as they invite consideration of an agency that is multiple and beyond arborescent capture.<\/p>\n Therefore, when we see an image such as Highway #5<\/em> (Figure 5), we might see in this image an aesthetic parallel with Oil Fields #22<\/em>.<\/p>\n Fig. 5 \u00a0Edward Burtynsky, Highway #5, Los Angeles, California, USA, 2009<\/em>.<\/p>\n In Highway #5<\/em>, tributary lanes of traffic converge into a river of asphalt that extends to the horizon in a seemingly endless bisection of the frame and the built landscape. Like the pipelines in Oil Fields #22<\/em>, the highway bends casually as it drifts toward the horizon; this curvature, again a feature of undomesticated objects, contrasts with the cadastral strips of habitation on either side. In the foreground is a highway that runs parallel with the frame, and in the background lie rolling hills. While the foreground and background portray conventional contrasts of striated and smooth space, the centre of the image features a provocative strip of highway that destabilizes our topographic expectations. The horizon once again gives the impression that the built landscape continues forever, the hills standing like phantasms on the edge of a dream.<\/p>\n Burtynsky\u2019s OIL <\/em>collection is organized to emphasize the ubiquity of oil and, I would argue, the distribution of agency. It is telling that the image of a pipeline opens the collection, and not an image of the point of extraction, refinement, or use; this is a collection about the places of passage. Without that epigraphic image of the pipeline, the rest of the collection would unfold in a more conventional way: the section titles progress from \u201cExtraction and Refinement\u201d to \u201cTransportation & Motor Culture\u201d and \u201cThe End of Oil.\u201d The last image in the collection, Recycling #10<\/em>, is that of oily footprints in the earth, taken at Chittagong, Bangladesh. The last section of the collection depicts abandoned oil wells, scrap yards with discarded jets and bombers, cars and tires, and the shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh where oil tankers go to die. Obviously, there is a conventional message here: the culture of oil leaves a footprint, and it is massive and destructive. But the image of the pipelines in the forest that opens the collection suggests we should not read the processes of petroculture as unidirectional and linear, as the obvious passage from extraction to deposit. Instead, consider the absence of human activity in the first and last images of OIL<\/em>. Burtynsky\u2019s vision is distinctly materialist, with human activity reduced to a relatively minor presence (in the few photographs devoted to \u201cMotor Culture\u201d and later to \u201cShipbreaking\u201d and \u201cRecycling\u201d). The diminution of human actors reveals at least two ways in which Burtynsky\u2019s photography is consonant with the \u201cmaterialist turn\u201d in cultural studies: first, his cadastral vision articulates what Patrick Joyce and Tony Bennett call the \u201cmuteness\u201d of infrastructural power, the ways in which \u201cinfrastructure is a good location for understanding how material powers can to varying extents operate outside human consciousness and language,\u201d the durable power of \u201cobjects and processes,\u201d \u00a0\u201cthis capacity to be left to operate by themselves\u201d (10); and second, Burtynsky\u2019s relative resistance to the \u201cclose range\u201d of smooth space suggests the primary concern of his photographs about oil is \u201cless the ways in which objects become effective by being integrated into the subjective world of human consciousness, and more the difference they make in their own right as a consequence of their specific material properties considered relationally\u201d (Joyce and Bennett 5).<\/p>\n I wanted to photograph the relationship between American society and the American landscape, and energy was the linchpin\u2026. Energy\u2014how it was made, how it got used, and the ramifications of both\u2014would therefore be my focus. (Epstein, \u201cAfterword\u201d )<\/p><\/blockquote>\n While Edward Burtynsky tells us he had his \u201coil epiphany\u201d in 1997, American photographer Mitch Epstein embarked on a form of what he calls \u201cenergy tourism\u201d in 2003 after witnessing the evacuation of an Ohio town from environmental contamination. For five years, Epstein catalogued the various forms of American energy production and their consequences. His comments in the Afterword of American Power<\/em> reflect a realization about energy that emphasizes the current moment as one of passage:<\/p>\n About a year into making this series of pictures, I realized that power was like a Russian nesting doll. Each time I opened one kind of power, I found another kind inside\u2026. But now\u2014while America teeters between collapse and transformation\u2014I see it differently: as an artist, I sit outside, but also within, exerting my own power.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Epstein\u2019s photographs share in common with Burtynsky\u2019s this sense of living between a dying empire and the sociality to come. They also share an understanding of being implicated as artists in what Imre Szeman calls \u201coil capitalism\u201d (Szeman 806). Many of Epstein\u2019s images, such as Amos Coal Power Plant<\/em> above (Fig. 6), juxtapose the settings of the New Topographics, in documentary form, with the types of energy that either make habitation possible or constitute the industry for that locale. In Amos Coal Power Plant<\/em>, a lower-middle-class habitat shares the frame with an apparitional power plant; the connection of everyday life with what in Burtynsky\u2019s images is often a distant and secluded phenomenon\u2014the production of energy\u2014foregrounds the associative ethos of Epstein\u2019s photo, and the lush, saturated conceptualism of the habitat makes the power plant seem even more discordant by contrast. Epstein\u2019s documentary proficiency and almost surreal conceptualism creates an effect much like the ambiguity of Burtynsky\u2019s cadastral images: something either banal or deeply corrosive acquires an aesthetic sheen that troubles the viewer\u2019s desire to condemn in simple binarisms the social and environmental causes and effects that produced this scene. Whereas Burtynsky prefers the cadastral spatiality of the distant view and the frequently unseen materials of petroculture infrastructure, Epstein visits many of the everyday spaces and architectures typical of the New Topographics. Epstein captures the associative qualities of energy production and transfer not by gesturing beyond the frame, as Burtynsky often does, but by filling the frame with uncommon objects within this transfer: the perforated American flag that adorns the refinery in BP Carson Refinery<\/em> (Fig. 7), for example, or the belching stacks of the Amos coal power plant observing a high school football practice in Poca High School and Amos Coal Power Plant<\/em> (Fig. 8).<\/p>\n Fig. 6 Mitch Epstein, Amos Coal Power Plant, Raymond City, West Virginia 2004<\/em><\/p>\nState Infrastructure<\/h4>\n
Edward Burtynsky\u2019s OIL<\/em><\/h4>\n
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<\/a><\/p>\nMitch Epstein\u2019s American Power<\/em><\/h4>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/001_AmericanPower.jpg\" "\\"001_AmericanPower\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/003_AmericanPower.jpg\" "\\"003_AmericanPower\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/002_AmericanPower.jpg\" "\\"002_AmericanPower\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/image0171.png\" "\\"image017\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n