Prompt 1 (CS)

I love raw nature, forests, giant waves, volcanoes, and so on, and at first I thought this was lava. It seemed like a beautiful photograph of a volcano, which I do like, but what really made me appreciate the image was finding out that it's NOT lava. It's nickel tailings, formed by industrial pollution and construction, and shows how man is completely changing the landscape around him. For me, art has always been primarily about aesthetics, which is why I like landscape photography - it's pretty, to put it simply. But this image is more than that, it's also a comment on industrialization and what we're doing to the world around us. I don't normally like political art, because I feel that most of it isn't visually/aesthetically pleasing, but this image somehow manages to combine both - it's strangely beautiful, but also has a message that I do agree with. We're changing the world and, though it may still look beautiful, like this photograph, the pretty colors are indicative of something very wrong.

















Edward Burtynsky, Nickel Tailings No. 34, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, 1996