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

9 May 2023
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Gaia VinceFeatures correspondent


Canadian professional photographer Edward Burtynsky discusses his surprising and all of a sudden sublime 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 recorded the impact of humans on the Earth in massive images that frequently resemble abstract paintings. The author Gaia Vince, whose book Nomad Century was released in 2022, interviewed Burtynsky for BBC Culture about his newest 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 away in a natural landscape made unnatural by our activities. Can you tell me about African Studies?


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


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


EB: All our drone equipment wasn't working due to the fact that we were 400 feet listed below sea 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 since we could not get it to adjust, it didn't know where it was.


The Danakil Depression is a large location covering about 200km by 50km. It's referred to as one of the hottest places on the planet and has actually been referred to as 'hell on Earth'. I have actually never ever operated in temperatures over 50C. In the evening, it was 40C - even 40 is practically excruciating. And we were sleeping outside because there are no structures, there are no interior spaces. We spent 3 days there shooting; in the early mornings we would get up and then drive as far as 25km to get to our locations. One such area was Dallol, a volcanic hellscape of sulfurous springs. Getting to it needed that we carry 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 night light and the morning light. So you're working both ends of the day and you actually don't get a great deal of rest in between that due to the fact that to get to the area in the early morning with that early light, you have to be up generally an hour and a half before that happens. But you do whatever you need to do. When I remain in that area, I'm much like, 'here's the issue, here's what I wish to do, what's it going to take?'


GV: Africa is the last big continent that has big quantities of wilderness left. Partly because of colonialism and other extractive industries from the Global North, the commercial transformation in Africa is happening now. So there's this juxtaposition in between that wild landscape and these very artificial landscapes that humans have produced - how do you comprehend that yourself?


EB: The African continent has a lot 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 huge rush for oil pipelines to be entering there. Particularly with China's participation, 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 resembles economic manifest destiny. I do not believe they desire full control of these nations. They desire an economic advantage, they desire the resources and they want the chance those resources supply. For example, the Chinese own the largest deposit of uranium yellowcake in all of the African continent - I photographed that mine.


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


EB: Some 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 warehouses. They constructed 54 of these sheds, with the roadway. So you can look at that picture - with the roads, with the lighting, with the pipes, with everything. All done, start to end up, 54 of these were developed 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 sewing machines and textile makers.


GV: The industrial revolution began in England and the factories of the North, and still if we dig, it's just totally contaminated soils and landscapes, and after that 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 simply keep offshoring. There isn't another location.


EB: I typically state that 'this is the end of the roadway'. We're fulfilling the end of globalisation and where you can go. And it has to leave China since they're gagging on the contamination. Their water's been totally polluted. The labour force has said: 'I'm not going to work for inexpensive wages like this anymore.'


So rather the Chinese are training textile employees - mainly female - in Ethiopia, and Senegal, and within two or three months, those women are behind sewing machines 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 maker sweatshop.


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


EB: Well, I have actually been following globalism but I started with the entire idea of simply taking a look at nature. That's the classification where I began, the idea of 'who's paying the rate 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 price is being paid, you understand, and they're all being pressed back. These are all the natural environments on earth that we utilized to coexist with, that we're now totally overwhelming in a manner. So nature's at the core - and all my work is truly 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 modification?


EB: Well, I would not 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 do not want to turn my work into an indictment, a two-dimensional kind of blunt tool to say, 'this is wrong, this is bad, stop and desist'. I don't think it's that easy.


I think all my work, in a manner, is showing us at work in 'business as usual' mode. I'm attempting to show us 'these are all real parts of our world that are unfolding every day in order to support what is now 8bn people, desiring to have increasingly more of what we in the West have'. I comprehended 40 years back, when I began taking a look at the population growth, and I got a possibility to see the scale of production, that this is just going to get larger. Our cities are just going to get more huge.


I chose to continue taking a look at the human expansion, the footprint, and how we're reaching around the globe, pushing nature back to build our factories, to construct our cities, to farm - we live on a finite world.


Going back to your initial question, I think the term 'revelatory' versus 'accusatory' has constantly been something that I'm comfy 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 environmental researcher David Suzuki as soon as stated it truly well. He utilized the metaphor of Wile E. Coyote going after the Road Runner - how suddenly the Road Runner can make a dogleg but Wile E. does not alter course, he keeps going and runs himself right over a canyon. Suzuki stated: '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 one of the things your pictures reveal us is that we are currently falling. We do not see this destruction in our great air-conditioned workplaces in the US or in London. We don't always feel the shock of that fall. But for people who are living on the edge, who are residing in the Niger Delta, for example, they're already very much experiencing this fall.


And I think that's something that your photos really show. They bring a more planetary point of view, however they bring it in a manner that we do not normally get to see. And among the reasons for that is that they are genuinely a various point of view. 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 travel book. They bring it in, in such a way that you can in some way see that scale.


EB: Photography has the capacity to do that, if you comprehend how it works and how to use it. But we do not really typically see the world that method, 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 electronic cameras. In a similar method, photography makes everything sharp and present simultaneously. 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 small truck or individual operating in the corner.


GV: That is the remarkable power of your pictures - there is this huge scale. And in the beginning, it's like an art work - it looks creative, 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 then you understand these tiny little ants or these little markings are massive stone-moving devices or high-rise buildings or something really big. But you manage to bring that absolute accuracy and information and focus into something that is really substantial. How do you do that?


EB: By and big I've used very high-resolution digital electronic cameras for the particular shots. You can likewise lock drones up in the air, it'll hold the cam even if it's windy up there; it will constantly be correcting 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 managing the high-resolution video camera through a video on the ground - the cam could be 1000 feet away - and then I can thoroughly shoot all the frames that I require to later on stitch together in Photoshop. Most of my work is single shots on high-resolution video cameras. The electronic camera 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 type 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 everything that I'm photographing is connected to this concept of what we people are doing to change the planet. 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 photograph practically 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 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 looking at art historical recommendations, whether it's abstract expressionism or other shared ideas with painting. I'll look at a specific topic, then hang out on how to approach it. What am I going to connect it into so that it appears in a method 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 images.


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 already comprehend from the culture that they know - different artistic movements.


EB: To me, it's fascinating to state, 'I'm going to utilize photography, but 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 minutes in history and stating, 'Oh, this is the 18th-Century direct, perfectly composed approach - a deadpan approach to photographing - for circumstances, the pyramids. I'm going to use that, because the shipbreaking lawns in Bangladesh require this technique.'


GV: I simply wanted to speak 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 however we are obviously based on the Earth for everything and we're all interconnected. I question how far a photograph can go to explaining that extremely complicated 3D idea of interconnectedness?


EB: Among the important things that photography and documentary filmmaking can do is reveal these things again and once again. It can reveal them, go to places where average people would typically not go, and have no reason to go, like a big open-pit mine. It can take you to the locations that we're all dependent on, oil fields and copper mines and cobalt mines. I believe it's more engaging that method. People can soak up info better than reading - images are actually useful as a type of inflection point for a much deeper discussion. I don't believe they can offer responses, but they can certainly 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 been about the person, it's had to do with our collective effect, how we collectively rearrange the planet, whether cities or infrastructure or dams or mines.


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


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