Edward Burtynsky's one-man show at the Robert Koch Gallery (49 Geary St., San Francisco), called simply "Shipbreakers", comprises 12 large color photographs taken on a barren, gently sloping beach near Chittagong, Bangladesh. Every year, hundreds of aging ships are scrapped on this beach, dismantled by manual laborers using little more than blow torches and pry bars. Burtynsky's photographs of this process are eerie and sometimes startling. One image, labeled "No. 4" (none of the photos is titled), shows a head-on view of the towering, ten-story carcass of a freighter, its front sections long since carved into small pieces and carted away. Sitting high and dry on the beach, with tiny human figures cutting away at its remains, the ship becomes a disquieting portrait of decay. But Burtynsky sees beauty in these scenes, too. Many images combine the warm glow of late-afternoon light on rusted iron with the glare of blow-torch flames to make strangely lovely portraits of these dead ships and the men who make them disappear. 

© 2001 Eamon Hickey