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

9 May 2023
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Gaia VinceFeatures reporter


Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky discusses his surprising and unexpectedly superb pictures - 'an extended lament for the loss of nature' - with Gaia Vince.


For more than 40 years, the Canadian professional photographer Edward Burtynsky has actually taped the effect of human beings on the Earth in massive images that often resemble abstract paintings. The writer Gaia Vince, whose book Nomad Century was published in 2022, interviewed Burtynsky for BBC Culture about his most current task, African Studies.


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


Edward Burtynsky: I read that China was starting to offshore to Africa, and I believed that would be actually intriguing to follow. Overall it's been a decade-long project, looking into and then photographing in 10 countries. I began 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 devices wasn't working due to the fact that we were 400 feet listed below water level. So the drone GPS was stating: 'You're not supposed to be here. You're at the bottom of the ocean'. We needed to turn off our GPS due to the fact that we could not 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 understood as one of the most popular locations in the world and has been referred to as 'hell on Earth'. I've never worked in temperature levels over 50C. In the evening, it was 40C - even 40 is nearly intolerable. And we were sleeping outdoors due to the fact that there are no buildings, there are no interior areas. We spent 3 days there shooting; in the mornings we would get up and after that drive as far as 25km to get to our areas. One such place 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 requiring what you're doing.


EB: That was! Yeah, it is typically and you're dealing with both the late evening light and the 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 since to get to the location in the early morning with that early light, you have to be up typically an hour and a half before that takes place. But you do whatever you need to do. When I'm in that area, I'm similar to, '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 large quantities of wilderness left. Partly because of manifest destiny and other extractive markets from the Global North, the industrial transformation in Africa is taking place now. So there's this juxtaposition between that wild landscape and these extremely artificial landscapes that people have created - how do you understand that yourself?


EB: The African continent has a great deal of wilderness left and there are a great deal of resources, like the discovery of oil in Tanzania and northern Kenya and other locations. There's a big rush for oil pipelines to be entering there. Particularly with China's involvement, there are a lot of plays to construct 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 economic colonialism. I do not believe they desire full control of these nations. They want a financial advantage, they want the resources and they desire the chance those resources offer. 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 extraordinary photographs 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 built what they call sheds, which are more like warehouses. They built 54 of these sheds, with the roadway. So you can take a look at that photo - with the highways, 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 after that by rails into Ethiopia and set up like a Meccano set. And when I was there, they were filling these sheds with stitching machines and fabric makers.


GV: The commercial transformation began in England and the factories of the North, and still if we dig down, it's just completely contaminated soils and landscapes, and then that was offshored to poorer nations 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 place.


EB: I typically say that 'this is completion of the roadway'. We're meeting completion of globalisation and where you can go. And it needs to leave China since they're gagging on the contamination. Their water's been entirely contaminated. The labour force has stated: 'I'm not going to work for cheap earnings like this any longer.'


So instead the Chinese are training fabric employees - mainly female - in Ethiopia, and Senegal, and within 2 or three months, those ladies are behind stitching 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 away 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 started with the whole idea of simply looking at nature. That's the category where I began, the concept of 'who's paying the cost for our population growth and our success as a species?' Broadly speaking, it's nature. It's the animals, the trees, the prairies, 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 the world that we utilized to exist together with, that we're now totally overwhelming in a method. So nature's at the core - and all my work is truly kind of a prolonged 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 trying to timely change?


EB: Well, I would not state activist - someone when pointed out 'artivist' and I liked that 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 type of blunt tool to say, 'this is incorrect, this is bad, stop and desist'. I do not think it's that simple.


I think all my work, in a manner, is showing us at work in 'company as usual' mode. I'm trying to reveal us 'these are all actual parts of our world that are unfolding every day in order to support what is now 8bn people, wanting to have a growing number of of what we in the West have'. I understood 40 years earlier, when I started looking at the population development, and I got a chance to see the scale of production, that this is only going to get bigger. Our cities are just going to get more massive.


I decided to continue taking a look at the human growth, the footprint, and how we're reaching all over the world, pushing nature back to develop our factories, to develop our cities, to farm - we reside on a finite planet.


Returning to your original question, I believe the term 'revelatory' versus 'accusatory' has actually constantly been something that I'm comfy with, in that I'm pulling the curtain back and stating, 'Look, guys, you know, we can still turn this ship around if we're smart about it. But failing that, we're gambling. We're betting the world.'


GV: What do you believe the chances are?


EB: The Canadian environmental researcher David Suzuki when stated it actually well. He utilized the metaphor of Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner - how suddenly the Road Runner can make a dogleg however 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 believe among the important things your images show us is that we are currently falling. We do not see this destruction in our nice air-conditioned offices in the US or in London. We do not necessarily 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 currently quite experiencing this fall.


And I believe that's something that your pictures actually show. They bring a more planetary perspective, but they bring it in a manner that we don't generally get to see. And one of the reasons for that is that they are really a different perspective. There is a bird's eye view there, an aerial shot, so we see something that we may just glimpse in a news reel or an image in a guidebook. They bring it in, in a manner that you can somehow see that scale.


EB: Photography has the capability to do that, if you comprehend how it works and how to utilize it. But we do not in fact normally see the world that method, 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 researchers are unloading it to comprehend how to make sensing units for cameras. In a comparable way, photography makes everything sharp and present at one time. Seeing my work at scale, as big prints, you can stroll up to them and you can take a look at the tire tracks and you can see the small truck or person working in the corner.


GV: That is the extraordinary power of your images - there is this huge scale. And initially, it's like an art work - it looks creative, abstract, maybe a painting since 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 small 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 outright precision and information and focus into something that is actually substantial. How do you do that?


EB: By and big I have actually utilized super high-resolution digital video cameras for the particular shots. You can also lock drones up in the air, it'll hold the cam even if it's windy up there; it will continuously be remedying for being buffeted. And after that with that precision, with that ability to hold it there, I can utilize a longer lens and do a group of shots of that topic. I'm managing the high-resolution cam through a video on the ground - the cam might be 1000 feet away - and after that I can carefully shoot all the frames that I require to later stitch together in Photoshop. Most of my work is single shots on high-resolution cams. The electronic camera I use now is 150-megapixel.


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


EB: I kind of walk that line. What I share with photojournalism is that there's a story 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 change the world. So that's the overarching story, whether it's wastelands or waste dumps, mines or quarries.


GV: You do also picture some natural landscapes, there is this sort of recurring pattern that rather typically what you photograph nearly 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 also has those repeaters in nature that take place 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 references, whether it's abstract expressionism or other shared ideas with painting. I'll take a look at a specific subject, then invest time 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 likewise shares in art history? If abstract expressionism never occurred as a movement, I do not think I would make these photos.


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


EB: To me, it's intriguing to state, 'I'm going to use photography, however 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 saying, 'Oh, this is the 18th-Century direct, beautifully composed approach - a deadpan approach to photographing - for example, the pyramids. I'm going to use that, due to the fact that the shipbreaking backyards in Bangladesh call for this technique.'


GV: I just desired 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 but nevertheless we are of course depending on the Earth for whatever and we're all adjoined. I question how far a photograph can go to discussing that extremely complex 3D concept of interconnectedness?


EB: One of the things that photography and documentary filmmaking can do is reveal these things once again and once again. It can show them, go to places where typical people would normally not go, and have no factor to go, like a big open-pit mine. It can take you to the areas that we're all depending on, oil fields and copper mines and cobalt mines. I think it's more compelling that way. People can take in info better than reading - images are truly useful as a sort of inflection point for a much deeper conversation. I don't think they can provide answers, but they can definitely lead us to awareness, and the raising of awareness is the start of modification.


With my photography, I'm coming in to observe, and my work has never had to do with the person, it's been about our cumulative effect, how we jointly rearrange the world, whether structure cities or facilities or dams or mines.


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


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