ABSTRACT
This chapter considers two very different renderings of the same wasting and the life of steel. Edward Burtynsky's work on industrially altered landscapes for the last thirty years offers a richer sense of the material recomposition of wastes. Burtynsky's images instead attend to the actual material decomposition of the ships on the beaches of Chittagong, and the very substance of the wastes. For Salgado, and many other more photojournalistic approaches to the site, the materiality that matters is the impact of ships and their breaking upon human subjects. Salgado takes the modernist style and inverts its narrative. The ghostly markings of ships past and given the datedness of the images, for all their technological and representational appeal as visual facts. Walter Benjamin pointed to the way photography can allow us to visualize the very small or apprehend the very fast through motion capture. The different modes of accessing the lives of the beach speak to different visualizations.
