Platinum photography has long been held in high esteem by photographers and collectors alike for its range of tones. Even in its darkest shadows, the platinum print still gives way to incremental detail; whilst its white hues – and everything else in between – extend to an equally broad spectrum. Mixed judiciously with palladium, one of its ‘sister’ metals, and used extensively by photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, it has been also prized for its durability and sheer permanence. Used and stored correctly, a platinum print can literally last thousands of years. The problem with platinum/palladium, however, is its expense in both monetary – it usually costs, depending on availability, slightly less than twice the price of gold – and environmental terms. It takes the sifting [and hence shifting] of one ton of ore, with all of the energy requirements, water, man-hours, and pollution that such a process would involve, to produce enough platinum to make five prints measuring 85 x 65 cm each. And these are not only the measurements of Simon Starling’s five prints, collectively titled One Ton, II (2005), but also aspects of the issues that this particular work explores: the degradation of an environment and the lunar-like scarring left behind in the process of mining platinum. The full title of the work describes the subject behind this image in particularly pertinent terms: “Five handmade platinum /palladium prints of the Anglo American Platinum Corporation mine at Potgieterus, South Africa, produced using as many platinum group metal salts as can be derived from one ton of ore.”

As with most of Starling’s work, this extra-textual element brings into play a socio-political, if not ethical, element to the work. The images in One Ton, II, an open quarry, are produced from platinum mined in the very mines represented. There is an insularity of thought and reciprocity of process present here that is particular to Starlings’ oeuvre; an interest in the autochthonous – that which is indigenous or originating from where it is found – and how it can be transubstantiated or changed into another substance, be it literal or metaphorical. As an artistic practice – or aesthetic practice – Starling’s work revolves around abstractions of thought that find their manifestation in the occasionally disturbing facts that underwrite our globalized and technology-driven societies.

The mine in Potgieterus, for example, is of the open-cast variety, a process whereby the top layers of soil and the so-called overburden – the material overlying a valuable mineral such as ore – are stripped away before mining proper begins. To observe that open-cast mining is an environmental nightmare of a particularly insidious kind is to note that the process leaves indelible scars upon the environment itself and a hefty carbon footprint for good measure. Furthermore, and bearing in mind the fact that the Anglo-American Platinum Corporation is the biggest extractor and therefore producer of platinum, One Ton, II further highlights the sinuous channels within which inequitable global trade operates: the environmental cost of mining platinum, that is, is localized whereas the financial gain is largely spread out amongst Anglo-American shareholders, the vast majority of whom, for sure, do not reside in Potgieterus or its surrounding environment.

It also further exposes, so to speak, a [western] world that has benefited greatly from globalization – the very forms of globalized contact that may bring environmental disaster closer still through increased environmental degradation in the name of progress and resource-production. And yet, the process that is documented here, in all its alarming monstrousness, yields images that are both surprisingly immediate and aesthetically effervescent. This scintillating immediacy, dare I say ‘beauty’, is the result of the eyesore depicted therein. And herein lies the paradox at the heart of this work: the aesthetic form of his work is the direct result of its content and, to a large extent, reliant on a process that degrades an environment whilst rendering another – that of the photographic surface – relatively impermeable and resistant to destruction.

One Ton, II is photography at its most conceptual: drawing upon one of the originary functions of photographic practice (that is, the mimetic reproduction of ‘reality’), Starling manages to disclose the socio-political ramifications and economic costs of such operations. Or, to put it another way, he does what most interesting art does: renders the aesthetic responsive to the socio-political, economic, historical and cultural dimensions of its time. It is all the more apposite that One Ton, II, like most autonomous artworks, has taken on a peripatetic global existence of its own. Having been seen as part of Starling’s Turner-prize winning show in 2005, it has since been shown as part of the Ecotopia show at the International Centre for Photography in New York, 2006, and will be on loan to the Lyon Biennial until 2008.