Edward Burtynsky's Photos Show The Scars Of Human-altered Landscapes

9 May 2023
ShareSave


Gaia VinceFeatures reporter


Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky discusses his stunning and all of a sudden sublime photos - 'an extended lament for the loss of nature' - with Gaia Vince.


For more than 40 years, the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has tape-recorded the impact of human beings on the Earth in large-scale images that typically resemble abstract paintings. The writer Gaia Vince, whose book Nomad Century was released in 2022, talked to Burtynsky for BBC Culture about his latest task, African Studies.


Gaia Vince: With your images we see the results of our consumption practices or our lifestyles, in our cities. We see the outcomes of that far, far in a natural landscape made abnormal by our activities. Can you tell me about African Studies?


Edward Burtynsky: I read that China was beginning to offshore to Africa, and I believed that would be truly intriguing to follow. Overall it's been a decade-long job, looking into and then photographing in 10 countries. I started in Kenya, and after that Ethiopia, then Nigeria, and then I went to South Africa.


GV: I saw that you went to the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia - inform me about that.


EB: All our drone equipment wasn't working since we were 400 feet below sea level. So the drone GPS was saying: 'You're not expected to be here. You're at the bottom of the ocean'. We needed to switch off our GPS because we could not get it to calibrate, it didn't understand where it was.


The Danakil Depression is a vast area covering about 200km by 50km. It's referred to as one of the hottest locations in the world and has actually been described as 'hell on Earth'. I have actually never worked in temperatures over 50C. During the night, it was 40C - even 40 is almost excruciating. And we were sleeping outside because there are no buildings, there are no interior areas. We invested 3 days there shooting; in the mornings we would get up and after that drive as far as 25km to get to our places. One such location was Dallol, a volcanic hellscape of sulfurous springs. Getting to it required that we carry all our heavy equipment while climbing up rugged rocks for about 1.5 km.


GV: It's physically incredibly demanding what you're doing.


EB: That was! Yeah, it is often and you're dealing with both the late evening light and the early morning light. So you're working both ends of the day and you really do not get a lot of rest in between that because to get to the location in the early morning with that early light, you have to be up usually an hour and a half before that occurs. But you do whatever you require to do. When I'm in that space, I'm just like, 'here's the problem, here's what I wish to do, what's it going to take?'


GV: Africa is the last big continent that has big amounts of wilderness left. Partly since of colonialism and other extractive industries from the Global North, the industrial transformation in Africa is taking place now. So there's this juxtaposition between that wild landscape and these really artificial landscapes that human beings have created - how do you understand that yourself?


EB: The African continent has a lot of wilderness left and there are a lot of resources, like the discovery of oil in Tanzania and northern Kenya and other locations. There's a huge rush for oil pipelines to be going in there. Particularly with China's involvement, there are a great deal of plays to develop infrastructure in exchange for access to resources, whether it's farmland for food security, whether it's oil, yellowcake uranium, and so on.


It's like financial colonialism. I do not believe they desire complete control of these nations. They desire a financial advantage, they desire the resources and they desire the chance those resources offer. For instance, the Chinese own the largest deposit of uranium yellowcake in all of the African continent - I photographed that mine.


GV: I likewise saw your unbelievable pictures from the shoe factory in Ethiopia. It looks completely shifted from China to Africa.


EB: Some of the photos were taken in Hawassa, which is a 200-acre Special Economic Zone, like Shenzhen in China. The Chinese developed what they call sheds, which are more like warehouses. They developed 54 of these sheds, with the road. So you can look at that image - with the highways, with the lighting, with the pipes, with whatever. All done, start to complete, 54 of these were constructed within one year - all the structures were brought by ship and after that by rails into Ethiopia and put up like a Meccano set. And when I was there, they were filling these sheds with stitching machines and textile makers.


GV: The commercial revolution started in England and the factories of the North, and still if we dig, it's simply completely contaminated soils and landscapes, and after that that was offshored to poorer countries and so on ... That cycle is striking Africa. But where is it going to be offshored next? We can't just keep offshoring. There isn't another location.


EB: I typically say that 'this is completion of the roadway'. We're satisfying the end of globalisation and where you can go. And it has to leave China because they're gagging on the contamination. Their water's been totally contaminated. The labour force has actually said: 'I'm not going to work for low-cost earnings like this any longer.'


So rather the Chinese are training fabric workers - mainly female - in Ethiopia, and Senegal, and within 2 or 3 months, those ladies lag sewing devices and on par with Chinese production rates and what they would've expected out of a Chinese factory. That's their objective. And they're training these young 16, 17-year-olds, taking them away from their families and then putting them right into the stitching maker sweatshop.


GV: At the heart of your images, they're very political, aren't they?


EB: Well, I've been following globalism but I began with the whole idea of simply taking a look at nature. That's the classification where I started, the concept of 'who's paying the price for our population growth and our success as a species?' Broadly speaking, it's nature. It's the animals, the trees, the grassy fields, the wetlands, the oceans - that's where the rate is being paid, you understand, and they're all being pressed back. These are all the natural surroundings on earth that we used to exist side-by-side with, that we're now absolutely overwhelming in a manner. So nature's at the core - and all my work is actually kind of an extended lament for the loss of nature.


GV: Do you see yourself as holding up a mirror to the world as it alters, and as it becomes more human-dominated? Or do you see yourself as an activist - are you attempting to prompt change?


EB: Well, I wouldn't state activist - somebody when pointed out 'artivist' and I liked that much better. 'Activist' seems to lean more into the direct political discourse - I don't desire to turn my work into an indictment, a two-dimensional kind of blunt tool to state, 'this is wrong, this is bad, cease and desist'. I don't think it's that easy.


I believe all my work, in a method, is showing us at work in 'business as usual' mode. I'm attempting to reveal us 'these are all actual parts of our world that are unfolding every day in order to support what is now 8bn individuals, desiring to have more and more of what we in the West have'. I comprehended 40 years earlier, when I started looking at the population growth, and I got an opportunity to see the scale of production, that this is just going to get bigger. Our cities are only going to get more massive.


I decided to continue looking at the human expansion, the footprint, and how we're reaching around the world, pressing nature back to develop our factories, to develop our cities, to farm - we reside on a finite world.


Going back to your initial question, I think the term 'revelatory' versus 'accusatory' has actually always been something that I'm comfortable with, in that I'm pulling the drape back and saying, 'Look, guys, you know, we can still turn this ship around if we're wise about it. But stopping working that, we're gambling. We're wagering the planet.'


GV: What do you think the odds are?


EB: The Canadian ecological scientist David Suzuki when stated it actually well. He utilized the metaphor of Wile E. Coyote chasing after the Road Runner - how all of a sudden the Road Runner can make a sharp turn but Wile E. does not change course, he keeps going and runs himself right over a canyon. Suzuki said: 'We are presently over the air with our feet running. And the only concern is, are we going to fall 10 feet or 500 feet?'


GV: I think among the important things your pictures show us is that we are already falling. We don't see this damage in our nice air-conditioned workplaces in the US or in London. We do not necessarily feel the shock of that fall. But for people who are residing on the edge, who are residing in the Niger Delta, for example, they're currently quite experiencing this fall.


And I think that's something that your photos truly reveal. They bring a more planetary point of view, however they bring it in such a way that we do not typically get to see. And one of the factors for that is that they are genuinely a various perspective. There is a bird's eye view there, an aerial shot, so we see something that we might only glance in a news reel or an image in a travel book. They bring it in, in a manner that you can in some way see that scale.


EB: Photography has the capacity to do that, if you understand how it works and how to use it. But we don't in fact generally see the world that way, from above. If you take a look at a Peregrine falcon, they have the highest resolution of any retina of any animal worldwide, and scientists are unloading it to comprehend how to make sensing units for electronic cameras. In a similar way, photography makes everything sharp and present simultaneously. Seeing my work at scale, as big prints, you can approach them and you can take a look at the tire tracks and you can see the little truck or individual operating in the corner.


GV: That is the extraordinary power of your images - there is this substantial scale. And at initially, it resembles an artwork - it looks artistic, abstract, perhaps a painting since you can select patterns. And after that you begin to realise: 'Actually no, this is something that's either natural or it's human made'. And after that you realise these tiny little ants or these little markings are huge stone-moving machines or skyscrapers or something really huge. But you manage to bring that absolute precision and information and focus into something that is really big. How do you do that?


EB: By and large I've utilized incredibly high-resolution digital video cameras for the particular shots. You can likewise lock drones up in the air, it'll hold the camera even if it's windy up there; it will continuously be fixing for being buffeted. And then with that precision, with that ability to hold it there, I can use a longer lens and do a group of shots of that subject. I'm managing the high-resolution cam through a video on the ground - the electronic camera could be 1000 feet away - and then I can thoroughly shoot all the frames that I require to later on sew together in Photoshop. Most of my work is single shots on high-resolution cams. The cam I use now is 150-megapixel.


GV: Your pictures are extremely painterly - do you see yourself more as an artist or more as a photojournalist?


EB: I sort of walk that line. What I share with photojournalism is that there's a narrative behind it. There's a story behind it. I would state that I lead with the art however whatever that I'm photographing is connected to this idea of what we humans are doing to transform the planet. So that's the overarching narrative, whether it's wastelands or waste dumps, mines or quarries.


GV: You do likewise photograph some natural landscapes, there is this sort of repeating pattern that frequently what you photo practically looks natural since it has those natural patterns in it like repeating circles from farming monocultures or watering patterns or the extraction patterns in quarries and delta sludge, all of that, it likewise has those repeaters in nature that take place in plants and in natural river systems. I actually liked your landscapes from Namibia, these natural sandscapes with the ancient sculpting of the bone-dry landscape.


EB: I'm leading with art, so I'm taking a look at art historical recommendations, whether it's abstract expressionism or other shared concepts with painting. I'll look at a specific subject, then hang out on how to approach it. What am I going to link it into so that it appears in a manner that has a signature of the work that I've been doing over time, and also shares in art history? If abstract expressionism never occurred as a movement, I don't think I would make these pictures.


GV: It's practically a translation, you're seeing these system changes and you're describing it to individuals in their language, in a familiar language that they currently comprehend from the culture that they understand - various artistic motions.


EB: To me, it's interesting to state, 'I'm going to utilize photography, however I'm going to pull a page out of that minute in history'. And if you take a look at it, throughout my work I'm pulling pages out of moments in history and stating, 'Oh, this is the 18th-Century direct, beautifully composed - a deadpan approach to photographing - for circumstances, the pyramids. I'm going to use that, because the shipbreaking backyards in Bangladesh call for this method.'


GV: I simply wanted to talk with you about the idea - something that you're getting at with your images - this concept that we are living now in this human-changed world but nonetheless we are naturally reliant on the Earth for whatever and we're all interconnected. I wonder how far a photo can go to describing that extremely complicated 3D idea of interconnectedness?


EB: Among the important things that photography and documentary filmmaking can do is expose these things once again and again. It can reveal them, go to locations where average people would generally not go, and have no factor to go, like a big open-pit mine. It can take you to the locations that we're all based on, oil fields and copper mines and cobalt mines. I believe it's more engaging that way. People can absorb information better than reading - images are actually helpful as a sort of inflection point for a much deeper conversation. I do not believe they can offer responses, but they can definitely lead us to awareness, and the raising of awareness is the start of modification.


With my photography, I'm can be found in to observe, and my work has actually never been about the individual, it's been about our cumulative effect, how we collectively reorganize the world, whether building cities or infrastructure or dams or mines.


African Studies is now gathered in a book and is on display at Flowers Gallery, Hong Kong until 20 May 2023.


If you would like to discuss this story or anything else you have actually seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.


And if you liked this story, register for the weekly bbc.com functions newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, provided to your inbox every Friday.


Photography


Interview