Pengah Wall #1, Komodo National Park, Indonesia, 2017

A rare picture within Burtynsky’s corpus, Pengah Wall #1, Komodo National Park, Indonesia, subtly departs from his sustained focus on landscapes transfigured by industry to present a flourishing coral reef in Indonesia. As Burtynsky reflects in commentary on the work, the photograph emerged from his Anthropocene project as part of a deliberate effort to document not only sites of environmental degradation but also ecosystems that remain relatively healthy.3 In this sense, the image functions as both record and warning. The reef’s dense, layered formations and vibrant colour register the complexity of a living system, while its expanse evokes the scale and vulnerability of underwater environments. Rather than focusing on damage, Burtynsky turns his lens toward resilience, positioning Pengah Wall #1 as a counterpoint within the Anthropocene project—a reminder that the work is also concerned with preservation along with the consequences of human activity.

The reef is found about twenty metres underwater and four kilometres off the coast of Indonesia. The picture was made possible by a variety of advanced technologies and a tight coordination of divers. Working with a crew of twenty-five, Burtynsky enlisted divers to photograph the site underwater. Over two hundred images were taken with the use of high-resolution digital cameras at identically calibrated distances from the reef. The photographs were later stitched together using computer software and merged imperceptibly into a single, continuous scene.

Teeming with life, this more optimistic vision of coral is usually presented at 1:1 scale as a photomural. Like wallpaper, a set of ink-jet membrane prints—called photographic scrim—are seamlessly adhered directly to the gallery wall. The myriad colourful details that the team recorded are naturally fascinating to the eye, and to the imagination.

In keeping with Burtynsky’s evolving plastic language during this period, the mural recalls the “all-over” treatment of mid-century abstractionists, especially the spongy paint surfaces of Milton Resnick (1917–2004) and, more famously, Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) with his “drip” paintings. Made only five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear apocalypse informed Pollock’s work and that of his generation: “It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age—the airplane, the atom bomb… in the old forms of the Renaissance.”4

The critic Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978), one of Pollock’s early champions, warned the artist’s imitators not to become purveyors of “apocalyptic wallpaper.” For better or worse, in art history, Pollock’s mid-century work has come to represent Armageddon—terrifyingly prefaced by American bombers at the end of the Second World War. If one recognizes the reference, the inevitable resemblance of Burtynsky’s coral reef to Pollock’s eschatological paintings may cast a grim pall over a scene that otherwise brims with health, vitality, and beauty. Without blaming or illustrating, and through mere inference, he manages to invest his picture with subliminal anxiety as similar sites wither and die elsewhere from the effects of global warming.