Oxford Tire Pile #8, Westley, California, USA, 1999

In the quiet spirit of nineteenth-century landscape painters such as Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867), a leading member of the Barbizon School, Burtynsky fixes his sights on an informal, human-made path—one imagines it as foot-worn, slipping up the hillside. But instead of climbing through groves, glades, or boulders, the eye is pulled up a steep ravine of discarded rubber tires. The composition is not unlike the trope familiar from countless landscape pictures—a path fading out into the infinity of nature—yet the details are industrial and administrative, rather than natural, albeit with a perspective as flat as an Edo period Japanese woodcut print. In this way, there is something ironically bucolic about a rustic trail etched through a choking mass of worn-out tires. We imagine being engulfed by a rubber avalanche should the eroding slope give way as we negotiate the hill. A few stray hoops have already tumbled into the path, illustrating the threat. But as the later fire would show, the real danger was more apocalyptic.

The path becomes metaphor as well as motif—an image of human passage that suggests pastoral expedience yet is ultimately overwhelmed by the scale of the waste around it. In this sense, the work recalls the Romantic sublime, particularly the vast silences of Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), whose figures gaze mesmerized into infinity. Here, no figures are needed; the narrow corridor fills in the absence, and the sublime is in a darker register.

Like the Barbizon painters who bridged Romanticism and realism, Burtynsky is attentive to surface, but his facture is mechanical, not gestural. Where Rousseau built up his textures with countless brushstrokes, Burtynsky uses lens and emulsion to achieve a forensic sharpness. The detail is such that one could, in theory, count every visible tire. His signature sharp focus and extreme depth of field deliver information with scientific precision, which only amplifies the emotional charge.

In reviews of his work, Burtynsky’s pictures are typically discussed in terms of the attraction/repulsion dynamic, an emotional push and pull—the incongruous beauty of pragmatic industry, the ironic seduction of waste. But in Oxford Tire Pile #8, that dynamic is subtle. The soft light diffuses shadow and tension. The humble path—odd amid the industrial mass—introduces a note of bucolic calm. Such emotional modulation gives the picture a quiet power that one might call uncanny: the harmony of the image contradicts the dread of the subject.

Like much of Burtynsky’s best work, the image confronts us with a contradiction we cannot easily resolve. Taste and good sense become unreliable as we are drawn to what should repel us. This is a novel iteration of Burtynsky’s postmodern sublime: not high drama, but slow-motion catastrophe.