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


For more than 40 years, the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has actually tape-recorded the impact of humans on the Earth in massive images that often look like abstract paintings. The writer Gaia Vince, whose book Nomad Century was published in 2022, talked to Burtynsky for BBC Culture about his latest job, African Studies.


Gaia Vince: With your pictures we see the results of our usage habits or our way of lives, in our cities. We see the outcomes of that far, far away in a natural landscape made abnormal by our activities. Can you tell me about African Studies?


Edward Burtynsky: I was checking out that China was starting to offshore to Africa, and I believed that would be actually interesting to follow. Overall it's been a decade-long job, researching and after that photographing in 10 countries. I started 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 - tell 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 saying: '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 large area covering about 200km by 50km. It's referred to as among the most popular places on the planet and has actually been referred to as 'hell on Earth'. I have actually never operated in temperature levels over 50C. During the night, it was 40C - even 40 is practically unbearable. And we were sleeping outside since there are no buildings, 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 areas. One such area was Dallol, a volcanic hellscape of sulfurous springs. Getting to it needed that we bring all our heavy devices while climbing up rugged rocks for about 1.5 km.


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


EB: That was! Yeah, it is typically 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 lot of rest in between that since to get to the place in the early morning with that early light, you need to be up usually an hour and a half before that happens. But you do whatever you need to do. When I'm in that area, I'm much like, 'here's the problem, 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 because of manifest destiny and other extractive markets from the Global North, the industrial revolution in Africa is occurring now. So there's this juxtaposition in between that wild landscape and these extremely artificial landscapes that humans have developed - 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 going in there. Particularly with China's participation, there are a lot of plays to build facilities 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 economic colonialism. I do not think they desire complete control of these countries. They desire a financial benefit, they desire the resources and they desire the opportunity those resources provide. 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 unbelievable photographs from the shoe factory in Ethiopia. It looks totally 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 constructed what they call sheds, which are more like storage facilities. They developed 54 of these sheds, with the highway. So you can take a look at that photo - with the streets, with the lighting, with the plumbing, with whatever. 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 machines and textile makers.


GV: The industrial transformation started in England and the factories of the North, and still if we dig down, it's just entirely polluted soils and landscapes, and after that 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 just keep offshoring. There isn't another place.


EB: I frequently state that 'this is the end of the roadway'. We're meeting the end of globalisation and where you can go. And it needs to leave China since they're gagging on the pollution. Their water's been entirely contaminated. The labour force has said: 'I'm not going to work for inexpensive incomes like this anymore.'


So instead the Chinese are training textile workers - primarily female - in Ethiopia, and Senegal, and within two or three months, those women lag stitching devices and on par with Chinese production rates and what they would've expected out of a Chinese factory. That's their goal. And they're training these young 16, 17-year-olds, taking them away from their families and after that putting them right into the stitching machine sweatshop.


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


EB: Well, I have actually been following globalism however I began with the whole idea of simply looking at nature. That's the category where I started, the concept of 'who's paying the rate 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 surroundings on the world that we used to exist side-by-side with, that we're now absolutely overwhelming in a manner. So nature's at the core - and all my work is actually type of a prolonged 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 change?


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


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 actual parts of our world that are unfolding every day in order to support what is now 8bn people, wishing to have increasingly more 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 a possibility to see the scale of production, that this is only going to get bigger. Our cities are just going to get more huge.


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


Returning to your initial concern, I think the term 'revelatory' 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 clever about it. But failing that, we're gambling. We're wagering the world.'


GV: What do you believe the odds are?


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


GV: I believe among the important things your images 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 don't necessarily feel the shock of that fall. But for people who are living on the edge, who are living in the Niger Delta, for example, they're already really much experiencing this fall.


And I think that's something that your images actually show. They bring a more planetary perspective, however they bring it in a way that we don't usually get to see. And among the reasons for that is that they are truly a different perspective. There is a bird's eye view there, an aerial shot, so we see something that we may only look in a news reel or an image in a travel book. They bring it in, in a manner that you can somehow see that scale.


EB: Photography has the capability to do that, if you comprehend how it works and how to use it. But we don't really typically see the world that way, from above. If you take a look at a Peregrine falcon, they have the greatest resolution of any retina of any animal on the planet, and scientists are unloading it to understand how to make sensing units for video cameras. In a comparable way, photography makes everything sharp and present at one time. Seeing my work at scale, as huge prints, you can stroll up to them and you can look at the tire tracks and you can see the little truck or individual working in the corner.


GV: That is the extraordinary power of your pictures - there is this huge scale. And initially, it resembles an artwork - it looks artistic, abstract, maybe a painting due to the fact that you can choose patterns. And after that you begin to understand: 'Actually no, this is something that's either natural or it's human made'. And after that you understand these small little ants or these little markings are huge stone-moving machines or high-rise buildings or something truly big. But you handle to bring that outright accuracy and information and focus into something that is truly big. How do you do that?


EB: By and large I have actually used super high-resolution digital cameras for the particular shots. You can likewise lock drones up in the air, it'll hold the camera even if it's windy up there; it will constantly be fixing 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 controlling the high-resolution camera through a video on the ground - the camera might be 1000 feet away - and after that I can carefully shoot all the frames that I need 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 pictures 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 narrative behind it. There's a story behind it. I would state 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 planet. So that's the overarching story, whether it's wastelands or waste dumps, mines or quarries.


GV: You do also picture some natural landscapes, there is this kind of recurring pattern that on a regular basis what you picture almost looks natural since it has those natural patterns in it like duplicating circles from agricultural 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 actually 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 references, whether it's abstract expressionism or other shared concepts with painting. I'll look at a particular topic, then hang out on how to approach it. What am I going to link it into so that it appears in such a way 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 believe I would make these pictures.


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


EB: To me, it's intriguing to say, 'I'm going to utilize photography, but I'm going to pull a page out of that minute in history'. And if you 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 technique - a deadpan method to photographing - for example, the pyramids. I'm going to use that, due to the fact that the shipbreaking backyards in Bangladesh call for this approach.'


GV: I just wanted to speak 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 however nevertheless we are naturally depending on the Earth for whatever and we're all adjoined. I question how far a photograph can go to explaining that very complicated 3D principle of interconnectedness?


EB: One of the things that photography and documentary filmmaking can do is expose these things once again and once again. It can show them, go to places where typical individuals would typically not go, and have no factor 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 compelling that way. People can soak up information much better than reading - images are really helpful as a type of inflection point for a deeper discussion. I don't think they can supply responses, however 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 had to do with the individual, it's had to do with our cumulative effect, how we collectively reorganize the world, whether building cities or infrastructure or dams or mines.


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


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