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 stunning and unexpectedly superb pictures - 'a prolonged lament for the loss of nature' - with Gaia Vince.


For more than 40 years, the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has taped the effect of people on the Earth in large-scale 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 latest task, African Studies.


Gaia Vince: With your images we see the outcomes of our consumption habits or our lifestyles, in our cities. We see the outcomes of that far, far 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 really interesting to follow. Overall it's been a decade-long project, looking into and after that photographing in 10 nations. 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 had to shut off our GPS because we couldn't get it to calibrate, it didn't understand where it was.


The Danakil Depression is a vast area covering about 200km by 50km. It's called among the hottest places worldwide and has actually been described as 'hell on Earth'. I've never operated in temperatures over 50C. In the evening, it was 40C - even 40 is nearly excruciating. And we were sleeping outside since there are no buildings, there are no interior spaces. We spent three days there shooting; in the early mornings we would get up and after that drive as far as 25km to get to our places. One such place was Dallol, a volcanic hellscape of sulfurous springs. Getting to it needed that we bring all our heavy devices while climbing 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 dealing with both the late evening light and the early 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 because to get to the place in the morning with that early light, you need to be up normally an hour and a half before that happens. But you do whatever you require to do. When I'm in that area, I'm similar to, '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 large quantities of wilderness left. Partly since of manifest destiny and other extractive markets from the Global North, the commercial revolution in Africa is taking place now. So there's this juxtaposition between that wild landscape and these extremely artificial landscapes that human beings have produced - 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 places. There's a huge rush for oil pipelines to be entering there. Particularly with China's participation, there are a great deal of plays to build 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 financial colonialism. I don't think they want full control of these countries. They desire a financial benefit, they desire the resources and they want the opportunity those resources provide. For instance, 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 photos from the shoe factory in Ethiopia. It looks totally shifted from China to Africa.


EB: A few of the photos 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 built 54 of these sheds, with the roadway. So you can look at that photo - with the streets, 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 erected like a Meccano set. And when I existed, they were filling these sheds with sewing makers and textile makers.


GV: The commercial transformation started in England and the factories of the North, and still if we dig, it's just completely 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 just keep offshoring. There isn't another location.


EB: I frequently state that 'this is completion of the roadway'. We're satisfying 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 entirely contaminated. The labour force has actually stated: 'I'm not going to work for low-cost incomes like this any longer.'


So instead the Chinese are training fabric employees - generally female - in Ethiopia, and Senegal, and within 2 or 3 months, those girls lag 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 households and then putting them right into the sewing maker sweatshop.


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


EB: Well, I've been following globalism however I began with the whole concept of just taking a look at nature. That's the category where I started, the idea of 'who's paying the price 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 price is being paid, you know, and they're all being pushed back. These are all the natural environments on the world that we utilized to coexist with, that we're now totally frustrating in a method. So nature's at the core - and all my work is actually sort 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 attempting to prompt 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 do not desire to turn my work into an indictment, a two-dimensional kind of blunt tool to say, 'this is incorrect, this is bad, stop and desist'. I don't believe it's that simple.


I think all my work, in a manner, is revealing us at work in 'organization as typical' mode. I'm attempting 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 comprehended 40 years earlier, 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 just going to get more massive.


I decided to taking a look at the human growth, the footprint, and how we're reaching worldwide, pressing nature back to construct our factories, to develop our cities, to farm - we reside on a finite planet.


Going back to your original question, I think the term 'revelatory' versus 'accusatory' has always been something that I'm comfortable with, because 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 betting the planet.'


GV: What do you think the odds are?


EB: The Canadian ecological scientist David Suzuki as soon as stated it really well. He utilized the metaphor of Wile E. Coyote chasing after the Road Runner - how suddenly 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 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 important things your pictures show us is that we are currently falling. We don't see this destruction in our good air-conditioned offices in the US or in London. We do not always feel the shock of that fall. But for individuals who are residing on the edge, who are residing in the Niger Delta, for instance, they're already quite experiencing this fall.


And I believe that's something that your images truly show. They bring a more planetary viewpoint, however they bring it in a manner that we do not generally get to see. And among the reasons for that is that they are genuinely a various 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 travel book. They bring it in, in such a way that you can somehow 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 actually usually 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 worldwide, and researchers are unpacking it to understand how to make sensing units for cameras. In a similar way, photography makes everything sharp and present simultaneously. Seeing my work at scale, as big prints, you can approach them and you can take a look at the tire tracks and you can see the little truck or individual working in the corner.


GV: That is the remarkable power of your images - there is this huge scale. And at initially, it resembles an artwork - it looks artistic, abstract, perhaps a painting because you can select patterns. And then you begin to understand: 'Actually no, this is something that's either natural or it's human made'. And after that you understand these tiny little ants or these little markings are enormous stone-moving devices or high-rise buildings or something really big. But you handle to bring that absolute accuracy and information and focus into something that is actually big. How do you do that?


EB: By and big I've used super high-resolution digital video cameras for the particular shots. You can likewise lock drones up in the air, it'll hold the video camera even if it's windy up there; it will continuously be correcting 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 subject. I'm controlling the high-resolution cam through a video on the ground - the electronic camera might be 1000 feet away - and then I can thoroughly shoot all the frames that I need to later sew together in Photoshop. Most of my work is single shots on high-resolution cameras. The 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 sort of walk that line. What I show 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 everything that I'm photographing is linked to this idea of what we people are doing to transform the planet. So that's the overarching story, whether it's wastelands or waste dumps, mines or quarries.


GV: You do also photo some natural landscapes, there is this kind of repeating pattern that rather often what you photo 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 also 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 referrals, 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 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 took place as a motion, I don't think I would make these photos.


GV: It's almost 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 artistic movements.


EB: To me, it's fascinating to state, 'I'm going to use 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, magnificently made up method - a deadpan method to photographing - for example, the pyramids. I'm going to utilize that, because the shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh require this method.'


GV: I just wanted to talk with you about the concept - something that you're getting at with your images - this idea that we are living now in this human-changed world but nevertheless we are obviously based on the Earth for everything and we're all interconnected. I wonder how far a photo can go to discussing that very complicated 3D principle of interconnectedness?


EB: One of the important things that photography and documentary filmmaking can do is reveal these things once again and again. It can show them, go to places where typical individuals would generally not go, and have no factor to go, like a huge open-pit mine. It can take you to the locations that we're all reliant on, oil fields and copper mines and cobalt mines. I believe it's more engaging that way. People can absorb info much better than reading - images are truly beneficial as a sort of inflection point for a much deeper discussion. I do not think they can offer answers, but they can certainly lead us to awareness, and the raising of awareness is the beginning of modification.


With my photography, I'm coming in to observe, and my work has never ever been about the individual, it's been about our collective impact, how we collectively rearrange the world, whether structure cities or infrastructure or dams or mines.


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


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