Shipbreaking #13, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000

In Shipbreaking #13, Chittagong, Bangladesh, twilight blurs the threshold between spectacle and lament. The fragmentary remnants of rusted steel hulls suggest not only industrial decay but also monumental sculpture. The reference to artists such as Richard Serra (1938–2024), Mark di Suvero (b.1933), Anthony Caro (1924–2013), and Robert Murray (b.1936), is unmistakable, given the way the fragments of these dismembered ships mimic modernist form—tilted, jagged, and geometrically unaccountable. And yet, these visual echoes of minimalist sculpture are double-edged. Where modernist abstraction often distanced itself from political questions in pursuit of the purity of form, Burtynsky reinscribes such a focus into a context of politics. His lens doesn’t just document; it implicates. These aren’t installations in a sculpture park—they are industrial carcasses, laid bare in the mudflats of a postcolonial economy.

With the Shipbreaking series, Burtynsky expanded on his engagement with the theme of waste. In 2000, he travelled to Bangladesh to photograph the process in which decommissioned oil tankers are dismantled by hand by teams of labourers, an industrial afterlife occasioned by the regulatory fallout of the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989. The resulting series, Shipbreaking, marked a notable shift in his practice. Unlike the depopulated vistas of Tailings, Railcuts, or Quarries, these images illustrate labour directly. Although they verge on photojournalism, they remain unmistakably Burtynskian in their formal clarity and restrained emotional register. What emerges is a heightened awareness of labour, a thread running silently through earlier work but made explicit here.

Shipbreaking #13 is perhaps the most visually evocative of the images in the Shipbreaking series, reminiscent of a dusky tonal palette found in the works of nineteenth-century painters such as the German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) and members of the Barbizon School. But the work is filtered through a contemporary lens. This image and the rest in the series exposes the disjuncture between the mechanized, outsourced industries of the developed world and the body-intensive labour still prevalent in developing economies. The workers at Chittagong dismantle behemoth vessels with hand-tools and no protective gear—often barefoot and shirtless—amid sharp steel and toxic residue. This is labour at its most elemental and perilous. The health risks are grave, and fatalities are common. The imagery serves as a chilling rejoinder to the sanitized myth of global progress.

The irony is biting: the same visual language that once stood for aesthetic autonomy and radical form now returns as the detritus of “late capitalism.” Burtynsky collapses the distance between art and industry, between form and exploitation. Whether consciously or not, Shipbreaking #13 folds aesthetic modernism into the moral ambivalence of globalization—revealing, perhaps, that there is no defended border between them.