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 surprising and suddenly sublime pictures - 'a prolonged lament for the loss of nature' - with Gaia Vince.


For more than 40 years, the Canadian professional photographer Edward Burtynsky has tape-recorded the effect of humans on the Earth in massive images that often resemble abstract paintings. The writer Gaia Vince, whose book Nomad Century was released 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 routines or our lifestyles, in our cities. We see the outcomes of that far, far away in a natural landscape made abnormal by our activities. Can you inform 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 task, researching and then photographing in 10 countries. I began in Kenya, and after that Ethiopia, then Nigeria, and after that 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 because 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 needed to turn 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 huge area covering about 200km by 50km. It's called among the most popular places in the world and has actually been referred to as 'hell on Earth'. I've never worked in temperatures over 50C. During the night, it was 40C - even 40 is almost excruciating. And we were sleeping outdoors because there are no structures, there are no interior spaces. We invested 3 days there shooting; in the mornings we would get up and after that drive as far as 25km to get to our places. One such location was Dallol, a volcanic hellscape of sulfurous springs. Getting to it required that we carry all our heavy equipment while climbing rugged rocks for about 1.5 km.


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


EB: That was! Yeah, it is typically 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 truly don't get a lot of rest in between that since to get to the location in the early morning with that early light, you need to be up generally an hour and a half before that occurs. But you do whatever you require to do. When I remain in that area, I'm similar to, '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 large amounts of wilderness left. Partly since 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 very artificial landscapes that human beings have developed - how do you understand 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 places. There's a huge rush for oil pipelines to be going in there. Particularly with China's involvement, there are a great deal of plays to develop infrastructure in exchange for access to resources, whether it's farmland for food security, whether it's oil, yellowcake uranium, and so on.


It resembles economic colonialism. I don't think they want complete control of these nations. They desire an economic advantage, 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 unbelievable photographs from the shoe factory in Ethiopia. It looks completely transposed 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 built what they call sheds, which are more like storage facilities. They developed 54 of these sheds, with the roadway. So you can take a look at that image - with the streets, with the lighting, with the pipes, with whatever. All done, start to end up, 54 of these were built within one year - all the structures were brought by ship and then by rails into Ethiopia and put up like a Meccano set. And when I was there, they were filling these sheds with sewing machines and fabric makers.


GV: The industrial revolution began in England and the factories of the North, and still if we dig down, it's simply 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 place.


EB: I typically state that 'this is the end of the road'. We're fulfilling 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 completely contaminated. The labour force has actually stated: 'I'm not going to work for inexpensive salaries like this any longer.'


So rather the are training textile workers - mainly female - in Ethiopia, and Senegal, and within 2 or three months, those ladies lag sewing machines 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 families and after that putting them right into the stitching device sweatshop.


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


EB: Well, I've been following globalism but I began with the entire idea of simply looking at nature. That's the category where I began, the idea of 'who's paying the price for our population development and our success as a species?' 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 know, and they're all being pushed back. These are all the natural environments on the planet that we utilized to exist together with, that we're now completely overwhelming in such a way. So nature's at the core - and all my work is actually kind 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 trying to prompt modification?


EB: Well, I would not say activist - somebody when mentioned '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 kind of blunt tool to say, 'this is incorrect, this is bad, cease and desist'. I do not think it's that basic.


I believe all my work, in a manner, is revealing us at work in 'service as typical' mode. I'm attempting to show us 'these are all real parts of our world that are unfolding every day in order to support what is now 8bn individuals, wanting to have a growing number of of what we in the West have'. I understood 40 years ago, when I began 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 massive.


I decided to continue looking 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 survive on a finite planet.


Returning to your original question, I believe the term 'revelatory' versus 'accusatory' has actually always been something that I'm comfy with, in that I'm pulling the curtain back and saying, 'Look, guys, you understand, we can still turn this ship around if we're smart about it. But failing that, we're gambling. We're betting the world.'


GV: What do you think the chances are?


EB: The Canadian ecological scientist David Suzuki once stated it actually well. He utilized the metaphor of Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner - how suddenly the Road Runner can make a dogleg however 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 believe among the important things your images show us is that we are currently falling. We do not see this damage in our good air-conditioned offices in the US or in London. We don't always feel the shock of that fall. But for people who are surviving on the edge, who are living in the Niger Delta, for example, they're currently extremely much experiencing this fall.


And I think that's something that your images really show. They bring a more planetary point of view, however they bring it in a manner that we do not generally get to see. And among the factors for that is that they are genuinely a different point of view. There is a bird's eye view there, an aerial shot, so we see something that we might just peek in a news reel or an image in a guidebook. They bring it in, in a way 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 in fact generally 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 in the world, and researchers are unpacking it to comprehend how to make sensing units for cameras. In a comparable way, photography makes everything sharp and present at one time. Seeing my work at scale, as big prints, you can stroll up to them and you can look at the tire tracks and you can see the small truck or individual operating in the corner.


GV: That is the extraordinary power of your pictures - there is this substantial scale. And initially, it resembles an art work - it looks creative, abstract, maybe a painting due to the fact that you can select patterns. And then you start to understand: '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 skyscrapers or something actually big. But you handle to bring that absolute accuracy and detail and focus into something that is really big. How do you do that?


EB: By and big I have actually used super high-resolution digital electronic cameras for the singular shots. You can also lock drones up in the air, it'll hold the camera 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 camera through a video on the ground - the electronic 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 cameras. The video camera I utilize now is 150-megapixel.


GV: Your photos 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 state that I lead with the art however whatever that I'm photographing is connected to this concept of what we people are doing to transform the world. So that's the overarching story, whether it's wastelands or waste discards, mines or quarries.


GV: You do likewise picture some natural landscapes, there is this sort of recurring pattern that on a regular basis what you photo practically looks natural due to the fact that 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 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 looking at art historical referrals, whether it's abstract expressionism or other shared ideas with painting. I'll take a look at a particular topic, then hang around 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 also shares in art history? If abstract expressionism never took place as a movement, I do not think I would make these pictures.


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


EB: To me, it's interesting to state, '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 moments in history and stating, 'Oh, this is the 18th-Century direct, wonderfully made up technique - a deadpan method to photographing - for circumstances, the pyramids. I'm going to utilize that, due to the fact that the shipbreaking lawns in Bangladesh require this method.'


GV: I just wanted to speak to 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 however we are naturally based on the Earth for everything and we're all adjoined. I wonder how far a photo can go to discussing that extremely complicated 3D concept of interconnectedness?


EB: Among the important things that photography and documentary filmmaking can do is reveal these things once again and again. It can reveal them, go to locations where typical individuals would normally not go, and have no factor to go, like a huge 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 engaging that way. People can soak up info much better than reading - images are actually helpful as a type of inflection point for a much deeper discussion. I don't think they can provide responses, however they can certainly 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 collective effect, how we jointly reorganize the planet, whether building cities or facilities 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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