Railcuts #1
C.N. Track, Skihist Provincial Park, British Columbia 1985
Railcuts #4
C.N. Track, Thompson River, British Columbia 1985
Railcuts #5
C.N. Track, Thompson River, British Columbia 1985
Railcuts #7
C.N. Track, Thompson River, British Columbia 1985
Railcuts #8
(Red hill, C.N. train) C.N. Track, Thompson River, British Columbia, 1985
Railcuts #9
C.N. Track, Thompson River, British Columbia 1985
Railcuts
Even in his choice of a title for this series, Burtynsky informs us that his photographs do not share an aesthetic agenda with earlier images of the railway. The title Railcuts evokes a sense of direct physical contact with the land. Blasted rock-face fills most of the frames in these images, and the tightly cropped views of the railway line seen head-on are strangely airless and even claustrophobic. Compared with the deep perspective used in works by nineteenth-century photographers who worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway, Burtynsky's viewpoint is close and confrontational. — Lori Pauli