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This does not mean Burtynsky's work feels message-driven. In photographic work documenting the large-scale changes that human beings make on their physical environment, such as "Mines," "Quarries," and "Railcuts" (all of which are large enough to be actual geological phenomenon but are in fact manmade, and each of which is documented in a separate photographic series) Burtynsky is showing, rather than telling. His work does not preach a save-the-planet message but instead allows the viewer to infer the presence of human activities behind these panoramic views of "un-natural" landscapes. I use the word "un-natural" because Burtynsky's work first meets the eye as standard nature photography -- a sort of Ansel Adams in Technicolor -- until the viewer realizes that these are not "natural" scenes but scenes of man-made disruption.

Burtynsky's work appeals to me for its relevance. We live in an era when climate change is happening fast due to human activity, while humans are not responding quickly enough for a crisis of such magnitude. While other art forms may attempt to capture an environmental theme -- plenty of Hollywood films have an obvious ecological message -- photographs like Burtynsky's do not manipulate an audience like a movie does. His pictures merely provide evidence, and let the audience draw their own sober conclusions. In some sense, the major work of aesthetic ordering and organization in Burtynsky's work is not the photography itself but the man-made structures and scenes that he depicts -- this problematizes our category of "the aesthetic" insofar as many of these devastated scenes have their own haunting and desolate beauty, and clearly that is part of Burtynsky's point.

2. Burtynsky's series "China" depicts the environmental and landscape changes caused by large-scale human development projects during China's ongoing economic boom. For example, Burtynsky's photograph "Feng Jie #3" from part of the series of the "Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, China 2002" is only a little more than ten years old, and shows construction on an electrical generation dam being built on one of China's largest rivers. Compositionally speaking, "Feng Jie #3" uses the traditional elements of photography to frame Burtynsky's evident message. The predominant color in the photo is the ashen grey stone of the broken rubble that litters the landscape, presumably stone used in the building of the dam itself. But this landscape has become inhospitable for human habitation, and so on the far left of the photo -- where the eye naturally begins to "read" the image from left to right -- we can see a colorful and flimsy cloth tent, which is the closest to a human dwelling that can be placed on top of this vast rockpile. In the distance also on the left we can see an actual human dwelling -- a multi-story concrete apartment dwelling -- which is framed to provide context to the cloth tent. But the overall movement of