the end of the line

it sounds awfully pretentious to say i have a favorite photographer, but i totally dig (and i’ve mentioned this before) edward burtynsky’s work since i saw it in a gallery in san diego a few years ago. suz would probably say that i like it because it’s the apotheosis of all the idiosyncrasies she accuses me of (which is to say, excessive use of lines, a love of large scale, and flashes of bright color), and maybe she’s right, but at the same time, i’m not the only one, either.

so i watched manufactured landscapes last night, and was really intrigued by it; i wondered how a movie about photography would really work, but it seemed to be to be more of a framework for a few parallel commentaries, as if the filmmaker just kept running into burtynsky while happening to make a movie about the same stuff. for one, it’s really ballsy to put one’s film up for direct, immediate comparison with the work of an acclaimed photographer, and to the immense credit of the filmmaker for coming up with images of her own that stand up.

the other thing that was interesting about it was to see the far far end of the work i do—manufacturing. it’s one thing to talk about contract manufacturing in the far east for this product or that, another thing to see what that actually entails. i’d like to say it makes me want to redouble my efforts to make things easy to assemble, but that’s not always an option. how do you say “sorry” in chinese?