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

9 May 2023
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Gaia VinceFeatures reporter


Canadian professional photographer Edward Burtynsky discusses his surprising and suddenly sublime photos - 'an extended lament for the loss of nature' - with Gaia Vince.


For more than 40 years, the Canadian professional photographer Edward Burtynsky has actually recorded the effect of people on the Earth in large-scale images that typically resemble abstract paintings. The writer Gaia Vince, whose book Nomad Century was released in 2022, spoke with Burtynsky for BBC Culture about his newest task, African Studies.


Gaia Vince: With your images we see the results of our intake routines or our way of lives, in our cities. We see the outcomes of that far, far away in a natural landscape made unnatural by our activities. Can you inform me about ?


Edward Burtynsky: I read that China was starting to offshore to Africa, and I thought 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 observed that you went to the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia - inform me about that.


EB: All our drone equipment wasn't working due to the fact that we were 400 feet below water level. So the drone GPS was stating: 'You're not expected to be here. You're at the bottom of the ocean'. We needed to shut off our GPS because we couldn't get it to calibrate, it didn't understand where it was.


The Danakil Depression is a huge location covering about 200km by 50km. It's referred to as among the most popular places on the planet and has actually been described as 'hell on Earth'. I have actually never ever operated in temperatures over 50C. In the evening, it was 40C - even 40 is almost unbearable. And we were sleeping outdoors since there are no structures, there are no interior spaces. We spent three days there shooting; in the early mornings we would get up and after that drive as far as 25km to get to our locations. One such place was Dallol, a volcanic hellscape of sulfurous springs. Getting to it required that we carry all our heavy devices while climbing up jagged rocks for about 1.5 km.


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


EB: That was! Yeah, it is typically and you're working with both the late night light and the morning light. So you're working both ends of the day and you really do not get a lot of rest in between that due to the fact that to get to the location in the early morning with that early light, you need to be up typically an hour and a half before that takes place. But you do whatever you need to do. When I remain in that space, I'm just like, 'here's the problem, here's what I want to do, what's it going to take?'


GV: Africa is the last huge continent that has large quantities of wilderness left. Partly due to the fact that of manifest destiny and other extractive markets from the Global North, the commercial transformation in Africa is happening now. So there's this juxtaposition between that wild landscape and these very synthetic landscapes that human beings have created - how do you understand that yourself?


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


It resembles economic manifest destiny. I don't believe they desire full control of these nations. They desire an economic benefit, they desire the resources and they desire the chance those resources provide. For example, the Chinese own the biggest deposit of uranium yellowcake in all of the African continent - I photographed that mine.


GV: I also saw your unbelievable photos from the shoe factory in Ethiopia. It looks completely transposed from China to Africa.


EB: A few of the pictures 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 storage facilities. They constructed 54 of these sheds, with the street. So you can take a look at that picture - with the highways, with the lighting, with the pipes, with whatever. All done, begin to end up, 54 of these were developed within one year - all the structures were brought by ship and after that by rails into Ethiopia and set up like a Meccano set. And when I existed, they were filling these sheds with sewing makers and fabric makers.


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


EB: I frequently say that 'this is completion of the road'. We're satisfying the end of globalisation and where you can go. And it needs to leave China since they're gagging on the pollution. Their water's been entirely polluted. The labour force has actually said: 'I'm not going to work for low-cost wages like this anymore.'


So rather the Chinese are training fabric employees - mainly female - in Ethiopia, and Senegal, and within 2 or three months, those girls lag stitching devices and on par with Chinese production rates and what they would've anticipated out of a Chinese factory. That's their goal. And they're training these young 16, 17-year-olds, taking them far from their households and after that putting them right into the sewing machine sweatshop.


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


EB: Well, I've been following globalism however I began with the whole concept of simply looking at nature. That's the category where I began, the idea 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 meadows, the wetlands, the oceans - that's where the price is being paid, you understand, and they're all being pushed back. These are all the natural environments on the planet that we utilized to exist side-by-side with, that we're now absolutely overwhelming in a method. So nature's at the core - and all my work is really 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 changes, and as it ends up being more human-dominated? Or do you see yourself as an activist - are you attempting to prompt modification?


EB: Well, I would not state activist - somebody as soon as discussed 'artivist' and I liked that much better. 'Activist' seems to lean more into the direct political discourse - I don't wish to turn my work into an indictment, a two-dimensional kind of blunt tool to state, 'this is incorrect, this is bad, cease and desist'. I don't believe it's that basic.


I think all my work, in a way, is revealing us at work in 'business as typical' 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, wanting to have a growing number of of what we in the West have'. I comprehended 40 years earlier, when I started looking at the population growth, and I got a possibility to see the scale of production, that this is only going to get larger. Our cities are only going to get more enormous.


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


Returning to your initial question, I believe the term 'revelatory' versus 'accusatory' has constantly been something that I'm comfy with, because I'm pulling the curtain back and saying, 'Look, guys, you understand, we can still turn this ship around if we're wise about it. But stopping working that, we're betting. We're betting the world.'


GV: What do you think the chances are?


EB: The Canadian environmental researcher David Suzuki as soon as stated it actually well. He used the metaphor of Wile E. Coyote chasing after the Road Runner - how all of an abrupt the Road Runner can make a dogleg however Wile E. does not alter course, he keeps going and runs himself right over a canyon. Suzuki stated: 'We are currently 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 one of the things your images reveal us is that we are already falling. We do not see this damage in our great air-conditioned offices in the US or in London. We don't always feel the shock of that fall. But for individuals who are residing on the edge, who are residing in the Niger Delta, for instance, they're already quite experiencing this fall.


And I believe that's something that your pictures really reveal. They bring a more planetary perspective, but they bring it in a manner that we do not typically get to see. And one of the reasons for that is that they are genuinely a various viewpoint. There is a bird's eye view there, an aerial shot, so we see something that we might just peek in a news reel or an image in a guidebook. They bring it in, in a method that you can somehow see that scale.


EB: Photography has the capability to do that, if you understand how it works and how to utilize it. But we do not actually 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 in the world, and scientists are unpacking it to understand how to make sensing units for cameras. In a similar method, photography makes whatever sharp and present at one time. Seeing my work at scale, as huge prints, you can approach them and you can take a look at the tire tracks and you can see the little truck or person operating in the corner.


GV: That is the extraordinary power of your pictures - there is this big scale. And initially, it's like an artwork - it looks artistic, abstract, possibly a painting because you can choose patterns. And then you begin to realise: 'Actually no, this is something that's either natural or it's human made'. And then you understand these tiny little ants or these little markings are huge stone-moving makers or high-rise buildings or something truly huge. But you manage to bring that absolute precision and information and focus into something that is truly substantial. How do you do that?


EB: By and big I've used extremely high-resolution digital cams for the singular shots. You can also 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 accuracy, with that capability to hold it there, I can use a longer lens and do a group of shots of that topic. I'm controlling the high-resolution video camera through a video on the ground - the electronic camera could be 1000 feet away - and then I can carefully shoot all the frames that I require to later sew together in Photoshop. The majority of my work is single shots on high-resolution cams. The cam I use now is 150-megapixel.


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


EB: I type 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 say that I lead with the art however everything that I'm photographing is connected to this concept of what we humans are doing to change the world. So that's the overarching narrative, whether it's wastelands or waste discards, mines or quarries.


GV: You do likewise photograph some natural landscapes, there is this type of repeating pattern that frequently what you picture almost looks natural due to the fact that it has those natural patterns in it like duplicating circles from agricultural monocultures or irrigation patterns or the extraction patterns in quarries and delta sludge, all of that, it likewise has those repeaters in nature that occur in plants and in natural river systems. I really 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 looking at art historical references, whether it's abstract expressionism or other shared concepts with painting. I'll look at a particular subject, then hang around on how to approach it. What am I going to link it into so that it appears in such a way that has a signature of the work that I've been doing over time, and likewise shares in art history? If abstract expressionism never ever happened as a motion, I don't think I would make these photos.


GV: It's nearly a translation, you're seeing these system modifications and you're explaining it to people in their language, in a familiar language that they currently comprehend from the culture that they know - different creative motions.


EB: To me, it's intriguing to state, 'I'm going to use photography, but I'm going to pull a page out of that minute in history'. And if you look at it, throughout my work I'm pulling pages out of moments in history and stating, 'Oh, this is the 18th-Century direct, perfectly composed technique - a deadpan method to photographing - for example, the pyramids. I'm going to utilize that, since the shipbreaking lawns in Bangladesh call for this technique.'


GV: I simply wished to talk to you about the concept - something that you're getting at with your images - this concept that we are living now in this human-changed world however nonetheless we are of course based on the Earth for everything and we're all adjoined. I question how far a photograph can go to discussing that extremely complicated 3D principle of interconnectedness?


EB: One of the things that photography and documentary filmmaking can do is expose these things again and again. It can show them, go to places where typical people would usually not go, and have no factor to go, like a huge 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 method. People can soak up details better than reading - images are truly beneficial as a type of inflection point for a much deeper discussion. I do not believe they can supply responses, but they can definitely lead us to awareness, and the raising of consciousness is the beginning of modification.


With my photography, I'm coming in to observe, and my work has never ever been about the person, it's been about our cumulative impact, how we collectively rearrange the world, whether building cities or infrastructure or dams or mines.


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


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