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 shocking and unexpectedly superb photos - 'an extended lament for the loss of nature' - with Gaia Vince.


For more than 40 years, the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has actually taped the impact of people on the Earth in large-scale images that frequently resemble abstract paintings. The writer Gaia Vince, whose book Nomad Century was published in 2022, interviewed Burtynsky for BBC Culture about his latest task, African Studies.


Gaia Vince: With your photos we see the results of our intake habits or our way of lives, in our cities. We see the outcomes of that far, far 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 truly fascinating to follow. Overall it's been a decade-long task, researching and after that photographing in 10 nations. I began in Kenya, and then Ethiopia, then Nigeria, and after that 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 because we were 400 feet below sea level. So the drone GPS was stating: 'You're not supposed to be here. You're at the bottom of the ocean'. We had to switch off our GPS due to the fact that we couldn't get it to calibrate, it didn't know where it was.


The Danakil Depression is a vast area 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 have actually never operated in temperatures over 50C. During the night, it was 40C - even 40 is nearly excruciating. And we were sleeping outside since there are no structures, there are no interior spaces. We invested 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 very requiring what you're doing.


EB: That was! Yeah, it is often 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 because to get to the area in the with that early light, you need to be up generally an hour and a half before that takes place. But you do whatever you require to do. When I'm 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 large quantities of wilderness left. Partly since of manifest destiny and other extractive industries from the Global North, the industrial revolution in Africa is taking place now. So there's this juxtaposition between that wild landscape and these really artificial landscapes that humans 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 big 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, etc.


It's like financial manifest destiny. I do not think they desire complete control of these nations. They want a financial advantage, they want the resources and they want the opportunity 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 likewise saw your unbelievable photographs from the shoe factory in Ethiopia. It looks totally 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 constructed 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 roads, with the lighting, with the pipes, with whatever. All done, start to finish, 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 sewing makers and textile makers.


GV: The industrial transformation began 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 simply keep offshoring. There isn't another location.


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


So instead the Chinese are training textile workers - generally female - in Ethiopia, and Senegal, and within two or 3 months, those women are behind stitching 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 far from their families and after that putting them right into the sewing device sweatshop.


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


EB: Well, I've been following globalism but I started with the entire idea of just taking a look at nature. That's the category where I began, the concept of 'who's paying the price for our population development 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 pressed back. These are all the natural surroundings in the world that we utilized to exist side-by-side with, that we're now absolutely overwhelming in such a way. So nature's at the core - and all my work is really 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 changes, and as it becomes more human-dominated? Or do you see yourself as an activist - are you attempting to timely modification?


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


I believe all my work, in a manner, is revealing us at work in 'business as typical' 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 individuals, wishing to have more and more of what we in the West have'. I understood 40 years ago, when I started taking a look at the population growth, and I got an opportunity to see the scale of production, that this is only going to get larger. Our cities are just going to get more enormous.


I chose to continue taking a look at the human expansion, the footprint, and how we're reaching worldwide, pressing nature back to develop our factories, to build our cities, to farm - we reside on a limited world.


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


GV: What do you believe the chances are?


EB: The Canadian ecological researcher David Suzuki as soon as stated it actually well. He utilized the metaphor of Wile E. Coyote going after the Road Runner - how suddenly the Road Runner can make a sharp turn however Wile E. doesn't change 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 question is, are we going to fall 10 feet or 500 feet?'


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


And I believe that's something that your pictures actually show. They bring a more planetary viewpoint, but they bring it in a method that we don't generally get to see. And one of the factors for that is that they are really a different 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 somehow see that scale.


EB: Photography has the capacity to do that, if you comprehend how it works and how to use it. But we don't really 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 unpacking it to understand how to make sensing units for video cameras. In a comparable way, photography makes whatever sharp and present all at when. 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 small truck or person operating in the corner.


GV: That is the remarkable power of your pictures - there is this big scale. And in the beginning, it resembles an artwork - it looks artistic, abstract, possibly a painting because you can choose patterns. And then you start 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 enormous stone-moving devices or skyscrapers or something actually 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 big I have actually utilized super high-resolution digital cams for the singular shots. You can also lock drones up in the air, it'll hold the video camera even if it's windy up there; it will constantly be remedying for being buffeted. And then with that accuracy, with that capability 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 camera through a video on the ground - the camera could be 1000 feet away - and after that I can carefully shoot all the frames that I need to later on sew 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 images 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 say that I lead with the art but 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 disposes, mines or quarries.


GV: You do likewise photograph some natural landscapes, there is this kind of repeating pattern that frequently what you photo almost 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 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 take a look at a particular topic, then hang around 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 ever took place as a motion, I don't think I would make these pictures.


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


EB: To me, it's fascinating to say, 'I'm going to utilize photography, but I'm going to pull a page out of that moment in history'. And if you look at it, throughout my work I'm pulling pages out of minutes in history and saying, 'Oh, this is the 18th-Century direct, wonderfully composed method - a deadpan approach to photographing - for instance, the pyramids. I'm going to utilize that, since the shipbreaking lawns in Bangladesh call for this method.'


GV: I simply wanted to talk with 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 nonetheless we are obviously depending on the Earth for whatever and we're all interconnected. I question how far a photograph can go to describing that exceptionally complicated 3D principle 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 average individuals 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 believe it's more compelling that way. People can absorb info better than reading - images are truly useful as a type of inflection point for a deeper discussion. I don't believe they can supply responses, but they can definitely lead us to awareness, and the raising of consciousness is the start of modification.


With my photography, I'm being available in to observe, and my work has actually never been about the person, it's had to do with our collective impact, how we jointly reorganize the world, whether structure 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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