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

9 May 2023
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Gaia VinceFeatures reporter


Canadian professional photographer Edward Burtynsky discusses his startling and all of a sudden superb photos - 'a prolonged lament for the loss of nature' - with Gaia Vince.


For more than 40 years, the Canadian professional photographer Edward Burtynsky has actually tape-recorded the effect of humans on the Earth in large-scale 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, .


Gaia Vince: With your photos we see the results of our intake practices or our lifestyles, 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 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 job, researching and after that photographing in 10 nations. I began in Kenya, and after that Ethiopia, then Nigeria, and after that I went to South Africa.


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


EB: All our drone equipment wasn't working because 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 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 referred to as among the most popular locations on the planet and has been described 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 because there are no structures, there are no interior spaces. We spent three 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 place was Dallol, a volcanic hellscape of sulfurous springs. Getting to it required that we bring all our heavy equipment while climbing up jagged 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 working with both the late night light and the early morning light. So you're working both ends of the day and you actually do not get a great deal of rest in between that due to the fact that to get to the area in the morning with that early light, you have to be up typically an hour and a half before that happens. But you do whatever you need to do. When I'm in that area, I'm simply like, 'here's the issue, here's what I wish to do, what's it going to take?'


GV: Africa is the last huge 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 revolution in Africa is occurring now. So there's this juxtaposition between that wild landscape and these extremely synthetic landscapes that people have developed - how do you understand 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 places. There's a huge rush for oil pipelines to be going in there. Particularly with China's participation, 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, etc.


It's like economic colonialism. I do not think 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 biggest deposit of uranium yellowcake in all of the African continent - I photographed that mine.


GV: I also saw your amazing pictures from the shoe factory in Ethiopia. It looks completely transposed 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 built what they call sheds, which are more like warehouses. They constructed 54 of these sheds, with the highway. So you can look at that photo - with the streets, with the lighting, with the pipes, with everything. All done, begin to complete, 54 of these were built within one year - all the structures were brought by ship and after that by rails into Ethiopia and erected like a Meccano set. And when I was there, they were filling these sheds with sewing makers and textile makers.


GV: The industrial revolution began in England and the factories of the North, and still if we dig, it's simply completely contaminated soils and landscapes, and then that was offshored to poorer countries 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 pollution. Their water's been totally contaminated. The labour force has actually stated: 'I'm not going to work for inexpensive incomes like this anymore.'


So rather the Chinese are training fabric employees - primarily female - in Ethiopia, and Senegal, and within 2 or three months, those girls are behind sewing devices 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 then putting them right into the stitching maker sweatshop.


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


EB: Well, I've been following globalism however I started with the entire concept of simply looking at nature. That's the classification where I started, the concept 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 grassy fields, 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 coexist with, that we're now completely frustrating in a manner. So nature's at the core - and all my work is truly sort 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 trying to prompt modification?


EB: Well, I would not state activist - someone as soon as discussed 'artivist' and I liked that better. 'Activist' seems to lean more into the direct political discourse - I do not wish to turn my work into an indictment, a two-dimensional type of blunt tool to state, 'this is incorrect, this is bad, stop and desist'. I don't believe it's that basic.


I think all my work, in such a way, is revealing us at work in 'service as typical' 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 individuals, wishing to have increasingly more of what we in the West have'. I understood 40 years earlier, when I started looking at the population growth, and I got a chance to see the scale of production, that this is just going to get larger. Our cities are only going to get more huge.


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


Returning to your original concern, I believe the term 'revelatory' versus 'accusatory' has always 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 wise about it. But failing that, we're gambling. We're betting the planet.'


GV: What do you think the chances are?


EB: The Canadian ecological researcher David Suzuki as soon as said it actually well. He utilized the metaphor of Wile E. Coyote chasing after the Road Runner - how all of an abrupt the Road Runner can make a dogleg but Wile E. doesn't alter course, he keeps going and runs himself right over a canyon. Suzuki said: 'We are currently 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 among the things your pictures reveal us is that we are already falling. We do not see this damage in our great air-conditioned offices in the US or in London. We don't always feel the shock of that fall. But for individuals who are living on the edge, who are living in the Niger Delta, for instance, they're already extremely much experiencing this fall.


And I think that's something that your photos truly reveal. They bring a more planetary perspective, 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 viewpoint. There is a bird's eye view there, an aerial shot, so we see something that we might just 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 comprehend how it works and how to utilize it. But we do not actually typically 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 worldwide, and researchers are unpacking it to understand how to make sensors for electronic cameras. In a comparable way, photography makes whatever sharp and present simultaneously. 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 individual working in the corner.


GV: That is the extraordinary power of your images - there is this big scale. And initially, it's like an art work - it looks creative, abstract, maybe a painting due to the fact that you can choose out patterns. And after that 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 huge stone-moving devices or high-rise buildings or something really huge. But you handle 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've utilized extremely high-resolution digital video cameras for the singular 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 fixing for being buffeted. And after that with that precision, with that capability to hold it there, I can use a longer lens and do a group of shots of that topic. I'm controlling the high-resolution video camera through a video on the ground - the video camera might be 1000 feet away - and then I can thoroughly shoot all the frames that I require to later sew together in Photoshop. The majority of my work is single shots on high-resolution video cameras. The camera I utilize now is 150-megapixel.


GV: Your images are extremely 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 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 idea of what we humans are doing to change the world. So that's the overarching story, whether it's wastelands or waste discards, mines or quarries.


GV: You do also picture some natural landscapes, there is this type of recurring pattern that frequently what you picture almost looks natural because 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 occur 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 concepts with painting. I'll look at a particular subject, then hang out 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 happened as a movement, I don't think I would make these images.


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 - various artistic movements.


EB: To me, it's fascinating to say, 'I'm going to use photography, however 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 moments in history and stating, 'Oh, this is the 18th-Century direct, perfectly made up technique - a deadpan approach to photographing - for example, the pyramids. I'm going to use that, because the shipbreaking lawns in Bangladesh require this approach.'


GV: I simply wanted 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 however we are obviously based on the Earth for whatever and we're all adjoined. I question how far a photograph can go to describing that very complex 3D principle of interconnectedness?


EB: One of the important things that photography and documentary filmmaking can do is expose these things once again and again. It can show them, go to locations where average people would usually 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 based on, oil fields and copper mines and cobalt mines. I believe it's more compelling that method. People can absorb details better than reading - images are really helpful as a kind of inflection point for a much deeper discussion. I do not believe they can provide answers, however they can certainly lead us to awareness, and the raising of awareness is the start of change.


With my photography, I'm being available in to observe, and my work has actually never ever had to do with the person, it's been about our collective effect, how we jointly rearrange the planet, 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 until 20 May 2023.


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