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 surprising and suddenly 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 recorded the effect of human beings on the Earth in massive images that often look like abstract paintings. The author Gaia Vince, whose book Nomad Century was released 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 routines or our way of lives, 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 starting to offshore to Africa, and I believed that would be truly interesting to follow. Overall it's been a decade-long task, investigating 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 observed 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 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 due to the fact that we could not get it to adjust, it didn't know where it was.


The Danakil Depression is a vast location covering about 200km by 50km. It's understood as one of the most popular locations in the world and has actually been referred to as 'hell on Earth'. I have actually never ever worked in temperature levels over 50C. During the night, it was 40C - even 40 is almost excruciating. And we were sleeping outdoors since there are no buildings, there are no interior spaces. We invested 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 location was Dallol, a volcanic hellscape of sulfurous springs. Getting to it required that we bring all our heavy devices while climbing up jagged rocks for about 1.5 km.


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


EB: That was! Yeah, it is frequently and you're working 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 great deal of rest in between that because to get to the place in the morning with that early light, you have to be up normally 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 much like, '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 quantities of wilderness left. Partly since of manifest destiny and other extractive industries from the Global North, the industrial revolution in Africa is happening now. So there's this juxtaposition between that wild landscape and these very synthetic landscapes that humans 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 places. There's a big rush for oil pipelines to be going in there. Particularly with China's involvement, there are a lot of plays to build infrastructure in exchange for access to resources, whether it's farmland for food security, whether it's oil, yellowcake uranium, etc.


It manifest destiny. I do not believe they want complete control of these nations. They want a financial benefit, they want the resources and they want the chance those resources offer. 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 pictures from the shoe factory in Ethiopia. It looks totally 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 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 roads, with the lighting, with the plumbing, with everything. All done, begin 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 textile makers.


GV: The commercial revolution began in England and the factories of the North, and still if we dig, it's simply totally 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 completion of the road'. We're satisfying the end of globalisation and where you can go. And it needs to leave China because they're gagging on the pollution. Their water's been entirely polluted. The labour force has stated: 'I'm not going to work for inexpensive earnings like this any longer.'


So rather the Chinese are training fabric employees - generally female - in Ethiopia, and Senegal, and within two or 3 months, those girls are behind sewing makers 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 sewing maker 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 whole concept of simply taking a look at nature. That's the classification where I started, the concept of 'who's paying the cost for our population development and our success as a types?' 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 know, and they're all being pushed back. These are all the natural surroundings in the world that we utilized to exist side-by-side with, that we're now totally overwhelming in such a way. So nature's at the core - and all my work is really 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 alters, and as it ends up being more human-dominated? Or do you see yourself as an activist - are you trying to timely change?


EB: Well, I wouldn't say activist - somebody once discussed 'artivist' and I liked that much better. 'Activist' appears to lean more into the direct political discourse - I do not wish to turn my work into an indictment, a two-dimensional kind of blunt tool to state, 'this is wrong, this is bad, stop and desist'. I do not believe it's that basic.


I believe all my work, in such a way, is showing us at work in 'company as normal' 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, wanting 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 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 chose to continue looking at the human expansion, the footprint, and how we're reaching around the world, pressing nature back to develop our factories, to develop our cities, to farm - we live on a limited planet.


Returning to your initial concern, I think the term 'revelatory' versus 'accusatory' has actually constantly 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 wise about it. But stopping working that, we're gambling. We're wagering the planet.'


GV: What do you believe the chances are?


EB: The Canadian environmental scientist David Suzuki once said it actually well. He utilized the metaphor of Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner - how all of an abrupt the Road Runner can make a sharp turn however Wile E. does not change 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 concern is, are we going to fall 10 feet or 500 feet?'


GV: I think one of the things your photos reveal us is that we are already falling. We don't see this damage in our nice air-conditioned offices in the US or in London. We don't necessarily feel the shock of that fall. But for people who are residing on the edge, who are living in the Niger Delta, for example, they're currently quite experiencing this fall.


And I believe that's something that your photos really reveal. They bring a more planetary point of view, but they bring it in such a way that we don't usually get to see. And among the reasons 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 glance in a news reel or an image in a guidebook. They bring it in, in a way that you can in some way see that scale.


EB: Photography has the capability to do that, if you understand how it works and how to utilize it. But we do not really typically see the world that way, 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 unloading it to comprehend how to make sensing units for electronic cameras. In a comparable way, photography makes everything sharp and present simultaneously. Seeing my work at scale, as huge prints, you can walk up to 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 pictures - there is this substantial scale. And in the beginning, it's like an artwork - it looks creative, abstract, perhaps a painting due to the fact that you can pick out patterns. And after that you start 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 huge stone-moving makers or high-rise buildings or something actually 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 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 camera even if it's windy up there; it will constantly be correcting for being buffeted. And then with that precision, with that ability 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 cam could be 1000 feet away - and after that I can thoroughly shoot all the frames that I require to later sew together in Photoshop. Most of my work is single shots on high-resolution cams. 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 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 connected to this concept of what we human beings are doing to change the planet. So that's the overarching story, whether it's wastelands or waste disposes, mines or quarries.


GV: You do likewise photograph some natural landscapes, there is this kind of recurring pattern that on a regular basis what you photograph practically looks natural due to the fact that 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 take place 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 taking a look at art historical references, whether it's abstract expressionism or other shared ideas with painting. I'll look at a specific subject, then hang out on how to approach it. What am I going to connect it into so that it appears in a method that has a signature of the work that I've been doing over time, and also shares in art history? If abstract expressionism never ever happened as a movement, I don't think I would make these images.


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


EB: To me, it's intriguing to state, 'I'm going to use 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 technique - a deadpan technique to photographing - for instance, the pyramids. I'm going to use that, since the shipbreaking lawns in Bangladesh require this method.'


GV: I simply wished to talk to you about the idea - something that you're getting at with your images - this idea that we are living now in this human-changed world however however we are of course based on the Earth for whatever and we're all interconnected. I wonder how far a photo can go to describing that very complicated 3D concept of interconnectedness?


EB: Among the important things that photography and documentary filmmaking can do is reveal these things again and once again. It can reveal them, go to places where typical people would typically not go, and have no reason to go, like a big 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 soak up info much better than reading - images are actually beneficial as a kind of inflection point for a deeper conversation. I don't believe they can supply responses, but they can definitely lead us to awareness, and the raising of awareness is the beginning of modification.


With my photography, I'm can be found in to observe, and my work has never ever had to do with the person, it's had to do with our collective effect, how we collectively reorganize the planet, whether structure cities or facilities or dams or mines.


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


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