Chapter

Railcuts #1, C.N. Track, Skihist Provincial Park, British Columbia, 1985

In 1985, three years out of Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, Burtynsky began two notable early projects: Homesteads, a small group of photographs taken from above depicting family compounds at the edge of the wilderness; and Railcuts, a focused collection showing rail lines blasted through mountainsides in the Rockies. Both projects are relevant to the artist’s larger project to document the imprint of human activity on the land. But of the two, Railcuts aligns more clearly with the formal and conceptual direction of his later work, especially in its preference for depopulated vistas.

Nowhere was the legendary Canadian railway enterprise more dramatically enacted than in the Rocky Mountains, as seen in Railcuts #1, C.N. Track, Skihist Provincial Park, British Columbia. The immense labour required to lay track here made it possible for British Columbia to join Confederation by physically linking it to the rest of Canada. In Burtynsky’s picture, this monumental intervention is registered as a fine horizontal incision near the base of a slope populated with conifers. The forest thins as it approaches the engineered cut, as if the trees were intimidated by it. Seventeen railcars traverse the image in a straight line that draws the eye from end to end. Erosion, rendered as a vertical gouge of sandy soil, spills down the slope past the tracks, suggesting the land’s imminent revenge on the wound.

shot looking at opening into the mountain

black and white photo of a train stopped and men standing around it

There is a rigour to Railcuts #1 and other images in the series that signals the typological mindset the artist would later refine: each photograph contributes to a systematic meditation on a single industrial activity, in this case track laid on narrow platforms blasted out of rock. Austere compared to the romanticized railroad imagery of earlier generations—including Carleton Watkins (1829–1916), Francis Frith (1822–1898), and William Notman (1826–1891)—the series more directly implies that railroad-building is nation-making because transportation infrastructure represents continuous interconnection regardless of geographic impediments. And it does so from the cool conceptual distance of contemporary art.

The human cost of the railway is unspoken, but still palpable in national memory. We know that hundreds of workers, mostly Chinese immigrants denied legal rights and fair compensation, died constructing these lines. The dark subtext—one we often detect in Burtynsky’s work—is inaugurated here at the beginning of his career, albeit quietly. Had the pictures been less technically impressive––where is he standing to take such a shot?—the repetitive series might resemble a conceptual art project, rather than a strictly photographic one.

The refinement of Burtynsky’s craftsmanship elevates the subject aesthetically without compromising it as an idea. Railcuts #1 does not dramatize railroads. Instead, it softly announces what will become a central theme in his practice: the unstable balance between monstrous human ambition and the natural forces indifferent to it. Here, nature seems about to take the upper hand—but the contest is ongoing.