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

9 May 2023
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Gaia VinceFeatures correspondent


Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky discusses his stunning and suddenly 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 recorded the effect of people on the Earth in massive images that often resemble abstract paintings. The writer Gaia Vince, whose book Nomad Century was released in 2022, interviewed Burtynsky for BBC Culture about his newest job, African Studies.


Gaia Vince: With your photos we see the outcomes of our consumption practices or our lifestyles, 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 starting to offshore to Africa, and I thought that would be really fascinating to follow. Overall it's been a decade-long task, looking into and after that photographing in 10 countries. I started in Kenya, and then 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 since we were 400 feet 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 had to turn off our GPS since we couldn't get it to adjust, it didn't know where it was.


The Danakil Depression is a large area covering about 200km by 50km. It's referred to as among the hottest locations in the world and has been described as 'hell on Earth'. I have actually never operated in temperatures over 50C. During the night, it was 40C - even 40 is practically intolerable. And we were sleeping outdoors due to the fact that there are no structures, there are no interior areas. We spent 3 days there shooting; in the mornings we would get up and then drive as far as 25km to get to our areas. One such area was Dallol, a volcanic hellscape of . Getting to it needed that we carry all our heavy devices while climbing up rugged rocks for about 1.5 km.


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


EB: That was! Yeah, it is often 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 actually don't get a great deal of rest in between that because to get to the area in the early morning with that early light, you need to be up usually 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 just like, 'here's the issue, here's what I want to do, what's it going to take?'


GV: Africa is the last big continent that has big amounts 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 taking place now. So there's this juxtaposition in between that wild landscape and these very synthetic landscapes that humans have created - how do you understand that yourself?


EB: The African continent has a lot of wilderness left and there are a lot 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 develop 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 financial manifest destiny. I don't believe they want complete control of these countries. They want a financial benefit, they want the resources and they desire 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 likewise saw your amazing photographs from the shoe factory in Ethiopia. It looks completely shifted from China to Africa.


EB: A few of the images 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 street. So you can take a look at that picture - with the roadways, with the lighting, with the plumbing, with whatever. All done, begin to end up, 54 of these were constructed within one year - all the structures were brought by ship and then by rails into Ethiopia and erected like a Meccano set. And when I existed, they were filling these sheds with stitching makers and fabric makers.


GV: The commercial transformation began in England and the factories of the North, and still if we dig down, it's simply totally polluted 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 place.


EB: I typically say that 'this is the end of the road'. We're satisfying completion of globalisation and where you can go. And it needs to leave China because they're gagging on the contamination. Their water's been entirely contaminated. The labour force has actually said: 'I'm not going to work for cheap incomes like this anymore.'


So rather the Chinese are training textile workers - primarily female - in Ethiopia, and Senegal, and within 2 or three months, those women lag sewing makers 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 families 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 however I began with the whole concept of simply taking a look at nature. That's the category where I started, 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 meadows, 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 environments in the world that we used to coexist with, that we're now completely overwhelming in such a way. 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 change?


EB: Well, I would not state activist - somebody once discussed 'artivist' and I liked that better. 'Activist' appears to lean more into the direct political discourse - I do not want to turn my work into an indictment, a two-dimensional sort of blunt tool to say, 'this is wrong, this is bad, cease and desist'. I do not believe it's that basic.


I think all my work, in a method, is showing us at work in 'service as usual' mode. I'm attempting 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, wanting to have a growing number of of what we in the West have'. I understood 40 years ago, 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 larger. Our cities are only going to get more massive.


I chose to continue looking at the human expansion, the footprint, and how we're reaching around the world, pressing nature back to develop our factories, to build our cities, to farm - we live on a finite world.


Returning to your original question, 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 stating, 'Look, guys, you know, we can still turn this ship around if we're smart about it. But stopping working that, we're gambling. We're betting the world.'


GV: What do you think the odds are?


EB: The Canadian environmental researcher David Suzuki when stated it really well. He used the metaphor of Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner - how all of an unexpected the Road Runner can make a dogleg however Wile E. doesn't alter 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 question is, are we going to fall 10 feet or 500 feet?'


GV: I think among the things your images reveal us is that we are already falling. We do not see this damage 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 residing in the Niger Delta, for example, they're currently extremely much experiencing this fall.


And I think that's something that your photos really show. They bring a more planetary viewpoint, however they bring it in such a way that we do not typically get to see. And one of the reasons for that is that they are really a different viewpoint. There is a bird's eye view there, an aerial shot, so we see something that we may just peek in a news reel or an image in a guidebook. 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 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 in the world, and researchers are unpacking it to understand how to make sensors for electronic cameras. In a similar method, photography makes everything 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 amazing power of your pictures - there is this substantial scale. And in the beginning, it resembles an artwork - it looks creative, abstract, possibly a painting due to the fact that you can select patterns. And then you begin to realise: 'Actually no, this is something that's either natural or it's human made'. And then you realise these tiny little ants or these little markings are enormous stone-moving devices or high-rise buildings or something truly big. But you manage to bring that outright accuracy and detail and focus into something that is really substantial. How do you do that?


EB: By and large I have actually utilized extremely high-resolution digital cams for the singular shots. You can also 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 subject. I'm managing the high-resolution video camera through a video on the ground - the cam might be 1000 feet away - and then I can thoroughly 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 video 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 show photojournalism is that there's a story behind it. There's a story behind it. I would say that I lead with the art however everything that I'm photographing is linked to this idea of what we human beings are doing to transform the world. So that's the overarching story, whether it's wastelands or waste disposes, mines or quarries.


GV: You do also photo 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 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 historic referrals, whether it's abstract expressionism or other shared ideas with painting. I'll look at a specific subject, then spend time 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 ever took place as a movement, I don't think I would make these photos.


GV: It's almost a translation, you're seeing these system changes and you're explaining it to people in their language, in a familiar language that they already understand from the culture that they know - different artistic movements.


EB: To me, it's intriguing to state, 'I'm going to utilize 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 moments in history and stating, 'Oh, this is the 18th-Century direct, perfectly made up approach - a deadpan technique to photographing - for instance, the pyramids. I'm going to use that, since the shipbreaking backyards in Bangladesh require this approach.'


GV: I just wished 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 however nevertheless we are obviously based on the Earth for whatever and we're all adjoined. I question how far a photo can go to describing that very complex 3D concept of interconnectedness?


EB: One of the things that photography and documentary filmmaking can do is expose these things once again and again. It can show them, go to places where typical individuals would generally 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 dependent on, oil fields and copper mines and cobalt mines. I believe it's more compelling that method. People can soak up information much better than reading - images are truly useful as a sort of inflection point for a deeper conversation. I do not think they can provide responses, but they can definitely lead us to awareness, and the raising of awareness is the start of change.


With my photography, I'm coming in to observe, and my work has actually never ever been about 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 collected in a book and is on display at Flowers Gallery, Hong Kong until 20 May 2023.


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