Edward Burtynsky - Oil

Oil, one of the most essential raw materials known to man, one that we use in everyday life and don't even realise. In our modern day and age we are using more and more oil to keep up to speed with the growing economy of our planet. 
Edward Burtynsky's Oil exhibition at the London Photographers Gallery addresses these issues through his images of the life cycle of oil. 

Oil Fields #19a - 

Belridge, California, USA, 2003 

This vast body of work has been in the making for nearly twenty years allowing Burtynsky to travel the world finding areas rich in oil that are being pushed to the very limit. 
The show its self was split up into three of the four sections, these were Extraction and Refinement, Transportation and Motor Culture and The End of Oil. 

As we move through this large body of work we are taken through the stages of oil and its life cycle. However in what way are we viewing this? Most would see this as a life to death progression, but in some ways it could be seen as a death to life story as well. 
In the words of Barthes "The Greeks entered into death backward: what they had before them was their past" 
The relevance that this has to this body of work is the idea is the idea that the use of oil is a circle, what is before the oil is its past as well as its future, as eventually it circles back around. 
Although with this in mind we might need to, once again look at Barthes Camera Lucida, and again at the idea of death and photography. "Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is a catastrophe"   

Shipbreaking #13 -Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000