Edward Burtynsky's Photos Show The Scars Of Human-altered Landscapes
9 May 2023
ShareSave
Gaia VinceFeatures correspondent
Canadian professional photographer Edward Burtynsky discusses his startling and suddenly sublime photos - 'an extended lament for the loss of nature' - with Gaia Vince.
For more than 40 years, the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has taped the impact of humans on the Earth in massive images that frequently look like abstract paintings. The writer Gaia Vince, whose book Nomad Century was published in 2022, talked to Burtynsky for BBC Culture about his most current project, African Studies.
Gaia Vince: With your images we see the outcomes of our consumption routines or our way of lives, in our cities. We see the results of that far, far in a natural landscape made abnormal by our activities. Can you inform me about African Studies?
Edward Burtynsky: I was reading that China was starting to offshore to Africa, and I believed that would be really intriguing to follow. Overall it's been a decade-long job, investigating and then photographing in 10 nations. I started in Kenya, and after that Ethiopia, then Nigeria, and then I went to South Africa.
GV: I discovered 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 saying: 'You're not expected to be here. You're at the bottom of the ocean'. We needed to switch off our GPS since we could not get it to adjust, it didn't understand where it was.
The Danakil Depression is a huge location covering about 200km by 50km. It's known as one of the hottest places worldwide and has actually been referred to as 'hell on Earth'. I've never ever operated in temperatures over 50C. During the night, it was 40C - even 40 is almost excruciating. And we were sleeping outside because there are no structures, there are no interior areas. We spent three days there shooting; in the mornings we would get up and then drive as far as 25km to get to our places. One such area was Dallol, a volcanic hellscape of sulfurous springs. Getting to it required that we bring all our heavy equipment while climbing rugged rocks for about 1.5 km.
GV: It's physically extremely demanding what you're doing.
EB: That was! Yeah, it is typically and you're working with both the late night light and the early morning light. So you're working both ends of the day and you really do not get a great deal of rest in between that due to the fact that to get to the place in the early morning with that early light, you have to be up typically an hour and a half before that occurs. But you do whatever you require to do. When I remain in that area, 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 huge continent that has large quantities of wilderness left. Partly due to the fact that of colonialism and other extractive industries from the Global North, the commercial transformation in Africa is occurring now. So there's this juxtaposition between that wild landscape and these really artificial landscapes that human beings have created - how do you comprehend 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 and other locations. There's a big rush for oil pipelines to be entering there. Particularly with China's participation, 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, and so on.
It resembles economic colonialism. I do not think they desire full control of these countries. They want an economic benefit, they want the resources and they want the chance those resources provide. For example, the Chinese own the largest deposit of uranium yellowcake in all of the African continent - I photographed that mine.
GV: I also saw your amazing photos from the shoe factory in Ethiopia. It looks totally shifted from China to Africa.
EB: A few 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 storage facilities. They developed 54 of these sheds, with the highway. So you can look at that image - with the roadways, with the lighting, with the pipes, with everything. All done, start to end up, 54 of these were built within one year - all the structures were brought by ship and then by rails into Ethiopia and put up like a Meccano set. And when I existed, they were filling these sheds with stitching machines and fabric makers.
GV: The commercial revolution began in England and the factories of the North, and still if we dig down, it's just entirely contaminated soils and landscapes, and after that 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 simply keep offshoring. There isn't another location.
EB: I typically say that 'this is the end of the road'. We're meeting completion of globalisation and where you can go. And it needs to leave China due to the fact that they're gagging on the pollution. Their water's been entirely contaminated. The labour force has stated: 'I'm not going to work for low-cost incomes like this anymore.'
So rather the Chinese are training textile employees - mainly female - in Ethiopia, and Senegal, and within 2 or 3 months, those women are behind sewing makers and on par with Chinese production rates and what they would've anticipated out of a Chinese factory. That's their objective. And they're training these young 16, 17-year-olds, taking them far from their households and after that putting them right into the stitching device sweatshop.
GV: At the heart of your images, they're extremely political, aren't they?
EB: Well, I've been following globalism but I began with the entire idea of simply looking at nature. That's the category where I started, the idea of 'who's paying the price for our population growth and our success as a types?' Broadly speaking, it's nature. It's the animals, the trees, the prairies, the wetlands, the oceans - that's where the cost is being paid, you know, and they're all being pressed back. These are all the natural surroundings on earth that we used to coexist with, that we're now totally overwhelming in a manner. So nature's at the core - and all my work is truly type 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 timely change?
EB: Well, I wouldn't state activist - someone 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 type of blunt tool to state, 'this is incorrect, this is bad, cease and desist'. I don't believe it's that easy.
I think all my work, in such a way, is showing us at work in 'business as usual' mode. I'm trying to reveal us 'these are all real parts of our world that are unfolding every day in order to support what is now 8bn people, wishing to have a growing number of of what we in the West have'. I comprehended 40 years back, when I started taking a look at the population development, and I got an opportunity to see the scale of production, that this is just going to get bigger. Our cities are just going to get more huge.
I decided to continue looking at the human expansion, the footprint, and how we're reaching all over the world, pressing nature back to construct our factories, to develop our cities, to farm - we survive on a finite planet.
Going back to your initial concern, I think the term 'revelatory' versus 'accusatory' has actually constantly been something that I'm comfortable with, because I'm pulling the curtain back and saying, 'Look, guys, you know, we can still turn this ship around if we're clever about it. But failing that, we're gambling. We're wagering the world.'
GV: What do you think the chances are?
EB: The Canadian environmental scientist David Suzuki once said it actually well. He used the metaphor of Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner - how all of a sudden the Road Runner can make a dogleg however Wile E. doesn't change 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 question is, are we going to fall 10 feet or 500 feet?'
GV: I think one of the things your pictures show us is that we are currently falling. We don't see this damage in our nice air-conditioned workplaces in the US or in London. We don't always feel the shock of that fall. But for people who are surviving on the edge, who are residing in the Niger Delta, for instance, they're already really much experiencing this fall.
And I think that's something that your photos truly reveal. They bring a more planetary point of view, but they bring it in a manner that we do not typically get to see. And among the factors for that is that they are truly a various point of view. There is a bird's eye view there, an aerial shot, so we see something that we may only glimpse in a news reel or an image in a travel book. They bring it in, in such a way that you can in some way see that scale.
EB: Photography has the capability to do that, if you understand how it works and how to use it. But we do not in fact normally see the world that way, from above. If you look at a Peregrine falcon, they have the highest resolution of any retina of any animal on the planet, and researchers are unloading it to comprehend how to make sensing units for cameras. In a similar way, photography makes everything sharp and present all at as soon as. Seeing my work at scale, as big prints, you can approach them and you can look at the tire tracks and you can see the little truck or individual working in the corner.
GV: That is the remarkable power of your pictures - there is this big scale. And at initially, it's like an artwork - it looks artistic, abstract, possibly a painting due to the fact that 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 devices or skyscrapers or something really huge. But you handle to bring that absolute precision and detail and focus into something that is actually huge. How do you do that?
EB: By and big I've used very high-resolution digital video cameras for the particular shots. You can likewise lock drones up in the air, it'll hold the electronic camera even if it's windy up there; it will constantly be fixing for being buffeted. And then with that accuracy, 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 video camera through a video on the ground - the camera might be 1000 feet away - and after that I can carefully 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 images are really 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 say that I lead with the art however whatever that I'm photographing is linked to this concept of what we people are doing to change the planet. So that's the overarching story, whether it's wastelands or waste dumps, mines or quarries.
GV: You do likewise photograph some natural landscapes, there is this type of recurring pattern that frequently what you photo almost looks natural since it has those natural patterns in it like duplicating circles from farming monocultures or irrigation patterns or the extraction patterns in quarries and delta sludge, all of that, it likewise has those repeaters in nature that happen in plants and in natural river systems. I truly 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 around on how to approach it. What am I going to connect 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 took place as a movement, I don't believe I would make these pictures.
GV: It's almost 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 understand from the culture that they know - different creative motions.
EB: To me, it's fascinating to state, 'I'm going to use photography, but I'm going to pull a page out of that moment in history'. And if you take a look at it, throughout my work I'm pulling pages out of minutes in history and stating, 'Oh, this is the 18th-Century direct, magnificently composed technique - a deadpan method to photographing - for example, the pyramids. I'm going to utilize that, because the shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh require this method.'
GV: I simply desired to speak with you about the concept - something that you're getting at with your images - this idea that we are living now in this human-changed world however however we are naturally based on the Earth for everything and we're all interconnected. I wonder how far a photo can go to describing that exceptionally complex 3D idea of interconnectedness?
EB: Among the things that photography and documentary filmmaking can do is expose these things once again and again. It can reveal them, go to places where average individuals would normally not go, and have no reason to go, like a huge open-pit mine. It can take you to the areas that we're all based on, oil fields and copper mines and cobalt mines. I think it's more engaging that method. People can absorb information much better than reading - images are truly useful as a sort of inflection point for a much deeper discussion. I don't believe they can provide responses, however they can definitely lead us to awareness, and the raising of consciousness is the beginning of modification.
With my photography, I'm being available in to observe, and my work has never been about the person, it's had to do with our cumulative effect, how we collectively rearrange the planet, whether building cities or facilities or dams or mines.
African Studies is now collected in a book and is on display at Flowers Gallery, Hong Kong until 20 May 2023.
If you want to talk about 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 choice of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.
Photography
Interview