Edward Burtynsky's 'Oil' at the Corcoran

An artist interested in tackling a big subject -- a subject such as mankind's dependence on oil -- has a tough job: You can't do it in one picture. Photographer Edward Burtynsky understands that. For the last 12 years he's taken hundreds of pictures in an effort to document our relationship with oil. A thrilling, haunting exhibition of 56 of them, "Edward Burtynsky: Oil," is on view now at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The show reveals not just the way we live and how, but it demonstrates that Burtynsky is a masterful story-teller. [Image: Talladega #1, 2009. For a screen-sized image, click here.]

Burtynsky's pictures are more New Topographics than they are, say, Robert Frank. The best of Frank's pictures have a self-contained narrative. Burtynsky's pictures don't work quite that way. Like the New Topos -- more on Burtynsky's apparent interest in them later in the week -- Burtynsky prefers telling his story slowly, over dozens of photographs.

That's not to say individual Burtynsky photographs are not tour de forces. They are. Consider the four-by-five-foot, detail-intense picture around which the Corcoran swirls: Talladega #1. Nothing about this photograph of the run-up to a NASCAR race at Talladega Superspeedway says much about our reliance on oil or our use of the planet in our pursuit of it... but considered in the context of 55 other pictures, the sentences that make up the book fall into place.

Acres of lawn fill the center of Talladega #1, a greenness made possible by petroleum-based fertilizer. Tens of thousands of people fill the stands. They drove to remote Lincoln, Ala. to see this race. The 43 cars that will run 499 miles around Talladega will burn through a gallon of gasoline every three or four miles. (Because a NASCAR sponsor wants to make sure you get the point, there's a Sunoco 'gas station' behind pit road.)

At the top right of the picture, military jets are flying in the missing-man formation, a symbolic four-plane grouping that is intended to recall the memory of a fallen pilot. This act of symbolism -- which, oddly, reinforces the recruiting the military does at NASCAR races -- requires an enormous amount of jet fuel. The asphalt on which the cars will race is made from oil.

Finally, in the foreground of the picture, a gas-guzzling big-rig cab pulls a big American flag down the Talladega tri-oval. Fans stand and cheer. Many hold up cameras to take pictures of the truck and the flag. Burtynsky, with Roth's help, is making a specific point by including this picture in the middle of a show about oil: Americans conflate consumption -- specifically the consumption of massive amounts of oil -- with patriotism. Talladega #1 is flanked by pictures that demonstrate the impact of the way we live, of how we have come to define the American dream.

More tomorrow.

Related: The personal story behind Edward Burtynsky's interest in oil.