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

9 May 2023
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Gaia VinceFeatures correspondent


Canadian professional photographer Edward Burtynsky discusses his shocking and suddenly superb pictures - 'an extended lament for the loss of nature' - with Gaia Vince.


For more than 40 years, the Canadian professional photographer Edward Burtynsky has actually taped the effect of humans on the Earth in massive images that often look like abstract paintings. The writer Gaia Vince, whose book Nomad Century was released in 2022, spoke with Burtynsky for BBC Culture about his latest job, African Studies.


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


Edward Burtynsky: I read that China was starting to offshore to Africa, and I believed that would be actually fascinating to follow. Overall it's been a decade-long project, looking into and then photographing in 10 nations. I began in Kenya, and then Ethiopia, then Nigeria, and then I went to South Africa.


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


EB: All our drone devices wasn't working due to the fact that we were 400 feet 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 needed to shut off our GPS because 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 called among the hottest places on the planet and has actually been described as 'hell on Earth'. I have actually never operated in temperatures over 50C. In the evening, it was 40C - even 40 is practically unbearable. And we were sleeping outside due to the fact that there are no buildings, there are no interior spaces. We invested 3 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 area was Dallol, a volcanic hellscape of sulfurous springs. Getting to it needed that we bring all our heavy equipment while climbing up rugged rocks for about 1.5 km.


GV: It's physically incredibly demanding what you're doing.


EB: That was! Yeah, it is typically and you're working 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 because to get to the place in the early morning with that early light, you have to be up usually an hour and a half before that takes place. But you do whatever you require to do. When I remain in that space, I'm similar to, 'here's the problem, here's what I desire to do, what's it going to take?'


GV: Africa is the last big continent that has big quantities of wilderness left. Partly due to the fact that of colonialism and other extractive markets from the Global North, the industrial revolution in Africa is occurring now. So there's this juxtaposition between that wild landscape and these extremely synthetic landscapes that human beings have created - how do you comprehend 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 locations. There's a huge rush for oil pipelines to be entering there. Particularly with China's involvement, there are a great deal 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 resembles financial manifest destiny. I don't believe they desire full control of these countries. They want a financial benefit, they want the resources and they want the opportunity those resources supply. 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 incredible pictures from the shoe factory in Ethiopia. It looks entirely transposed 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 built what they call sheds, which are more like warehouses. They developed 54 of these sheds, with the road. So you can look at that picture - with the highways, with the lighting, with the plumbing, with whatever. All done, start to finish, 54 of these were developed 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 devices and fabric makers.


GV: The industrial transformation began in England and the factories of the North, and still if we dig, it's simply entirely contaminated soils and landscapes, and after that 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 location.


EB: I typically say that 'this is completion of the road'. We're satisfying the end of globalisation and where you can go. And it needs to leave China due to the fact that they're gagging on the contamination. Their water's been totally polluted. The labour force has actually stated: 'I'm not going to work for inexpensive wages like this anymore.'


So rather the Chinese are training textile employees - primarily female - in Ethiopia, and Senegal, and within 2 or three months, those girls lag stitching machines 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 away from their households and then 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 have actually been following globalism however I started with the entire 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 species?' Broadly speaking, it's nature. It's the animals, the trees, the prairies, the wetlands, the oceans - that's where the cost is being paid, you understand, and they're all being pushed back. These are all the natural environments in the world that we utilized to coexist with, that we're now totally overwhelming in a manner. 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 say activist - someone when pointed out 'artivist' and I liked that much 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 state, 'this is incorrect, this is bad, cease and desist'. I don't believe it's that simple.


I believe all my work, in a manner, is revealing us at work in 'business as usual' mode. I'm trying 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, wishing to have increasingly more of what we in the West have'. I comprehended 40 years back, when I started taking a look at the population development, and I got a chance to see the scale of production, that this is just going to get bigger. 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, pressing nature back to develop our factories, to construct our cities, to farm - we survive on a limited planet.


Returning to your initial question, I think the term 'revelatory' versus 'accusatory' has actually 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 stopping working that, we're gambling. We're betting the planet.'


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 the Road Runner - how suddenly the Road Runner can make a sharp turn but Wile E. does not change 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 concern is, are we going to fall 10 feet or 500 feet?'


GV: I think one of the important things your photos show us is that we are already falling. We don't see this destruction in our good air-conditioned workplaces in the US or in London. We do not necessarily feel the shock of that fall. But for individuals who are living on the edge, who are residing in the Niger Delta, for instance, they're already very much experiencing this fall.


And I think that's something that your pictures truly show. They bring a more planetary viewpoint, however they bring it in a way that we do not normally get to see. And among the factors 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 might only look 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 in fact 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 in the world, and are unpacking it to understand how to make sensors for cameras. In a similar method, photography makes whatever sharp and present all at when. Seeing my work at scale, as big prints, you can approach them and you can look at the tire tracks and you can see the small truck or person working in the corner.


GV: That is the amazing power of your images - there is this huge scale. And in the beginning, it's like an art work - it looks artistic, abstract, maybe a painting because you can choose 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 realise these small little ants or these little markings are massive stone-moving makers or skyscrapers or something truly huge. But you manage to bring that absolute accuracy and information and focus into something that is really huge. How do you do that?


EB: By and large I have actually used very high-resolution digital cameras for the particular 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 remedying for being buffeted. And then 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 managing the high-resolution cam through a video on the ground - the cam might be 1000 feet away - and then I can thoroughly shoot all the frames that I need to later on sew together in Photoshop. The majority of my work is single shots on high-resolution video cameras. The camera I use now is 150-megapixel.


GV: Your photos are really 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 narrative behind it. There's a story behind it. I would state that I lead with the art however everything that I'm photographing is connected to this concept of what we people 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 likewise photograph some natural landscapes, there is this sort of repeating pattern that on a regular basis what you picture almost looks natural because it has those natural patterns in it like repeating circles from agricultural monocultures or watering 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 really 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 references, whether it's abstract expressionism or other shared concepts with painting. I'll look at a particular subject, then spend time 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 likewise shares in art history? If abstract expressionism never happened as a movement, I don't think I would make these pictures.


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


EB: To me, it's interesting to say, 'I'm going to utilize photography, however 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 minutes in history and stating, 'Oh, this is the 18th-Century direct, wonderfully composed approach - a deadpan approach to photographing - for example, the pyramids. I'm going to utilize that, since the shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh call for this method.'


GV: I simply desired 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 of course dependent on the Earth for everything and we're all interconnected. I wonder how far a picture can go to describing that exceptionally complex 3D principle of interconnectedness?


EB: One of the important things that photography and documentary filmmaking can do is reveal these things again and once again. It can show them, go to places where average individuals would typically not go, and have no reason to go, like a huge open-pit mine. It can take you to the locations that we're all depending on, oil fields and copper mines and cobalt mines. I believe it's more engaging that method. People can absorb information much better than reading - images are truly beneficial as a type of inflection point for a deeper discussion. I don't think they can offer answers, however 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 individual, it's had to do with our collective impact, how we collectively reorganize the planet, 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 till 20 May 2023.


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