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 all of a sudden 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 actually recorded the effect of people on the Earth in large-scale images that typically look like abstract paintings. The writer Gaia Vince, whose book Nomad Century was published in 2022, talked to Burtynsky for BBC Culture about his most current project, African Studies.


Gaia Vince: With your pictures we see the results of our intake habits or our lifestyles, in our cities. We see the results 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 starting to offshore to Africa, and I believed that would be truly interesting to follow. Overall it's been a decade-long project, investigating and then photographing in 10 nations. I started in Kenya, and after that Ethiopia, then Nigeria, and after that 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 since we were 400 feet listed 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 had to switch off our GPS due to the fact that we could not get it to adjust, it didn't understand where it was.


The Danakil Depression is a huge location covering about 200km by 50km. It's called one of the most popular places in the world and has actually been described as 'hell on Earth'. I've never worked in temperatures over 50C. At night, it was 40C - even 40 is nearly unbearable. And we were sleeping outdoors due to the fact that there are no buildings, there are no interior spaces. We invested 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 required that we bring all our heavy devices while climbing rugged rocks for about 1.5 km.


GV: It's physically very demanding 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 actually don't get a great deal of rest in between that due to the fact that to get to the place in the early morning with that early light, you need to be up normally an hour and a half before that happens. But you do whatever you need to do. When I remain in that space, I'm much like, 'here's the problem, 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 because of manifest destiny and other extractive markets from the Global North, the commercial revolution in Africa is happening now. So there's this juxtaposition between that wild landscape and these really synthetic 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 locations. There's a big rush for oil pipelines to be entering there. Particularly with China's participation, there are a great deal of plays to construct 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 do not believe they desire full control of these nations. They want an economic benefit, they desire the resources and they desire the chance those resources provide. For instance, the Chinese own the biggest deposit of uranium yellowcake in all of the African continent - I photographed that mine.


GV: I also saw your incredible photographs from the shoe factory in Ethiopia. It looks entirely shifted 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 built what they call sheds, which are more like storage facilities. They built 54 of these sheds, with the roadway. So you can take a look at that picture - with the roads, with the lighting, with the pipes, with whatever. All done, begin to end up, 54 of these were built within one year - all the structures were brought by ship and after that by rails into Ethiopia and set up like a Meccano set. And when I existed, they were filling these sheds with sewing machines and textile makers.


GV: The industrial revolution 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 location.


EB: I typically state that 'this is the end of the roadway'. 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 cheap salaries like this any longer.'


So rather the Chinese are training textile employees - primarily female - in Ethiopia, and Senegal, and within 2 or 3 months, those girls are behind stitching machines 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 then putting them right into the stitching maker 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 began with the whole idea of just taking a look at nature. That's the classification where I started, the concept 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 meadows, 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 earth that we used to coexist with, that we're now totally overwhelming in such a way. So nature's at the core - and all my work is actually type 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 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 as soon as discussed '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 wrong, this is bad, stop and desist'. I do not think it's that basic.


I think all my work, in a manner, is showing us at work in 'service as usual' mode. I'm trying to show us 'these are all actual parts of our world that are unfolding every day in order to support what is now 8bn individuals, wishing to have increasingly more of what we in the West have'. I comprehended 40 years ago, when I began 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 just going to get more enormous.


I decided to continue looking at the human expansion, the footprint, and how we're reaching worldwide, pushing nature back to develop our factories, to develop our cities, to farm - we survive on a finite planet.


Going back to your initial concern, I believe the term 'revelatory' versus 'accusatory' has constantly been something that I'm comfy with, because I'm pulling the curtain back and stating, 'Look, guys, you understand, we can still turn this ship around if we're wise about it. But failing that, we're gambling. We're wagering the planet.'


GV: What do you believe the odds are?


EB: The Canadian ecological researcher David Suzuki when said it actually well. He used the metaphor of Wile E. Coyote chasing after the Road Runner - how suddenly the Road Runner can make a dogleg but Wile E. does not 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 think one of the important things your photos reveal us is that we are already falling. We do not see this destruction in our nice air-conditioned workplaces in the US or in London. We don't 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 currently quite experiencing this fall.


And I believe that's something that your photos actually reveal. They bring a more planetary perspective, but they bring it in a manner that we do not typically get to see. And among the reasons for that is that they are truly a different point of view. 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 guidebook. They bring it in, in a method 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 generally see the world that method, from above. If you look at a Peregrine falcon, they have the greatest resolution of any retina of any animal in the world, and scientists are unpacking it to comprehend how to make sensing units for cameras. In a similar way, photography makes whatever 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 big scale. And initially, it's like an art work - it looks artistic, abstract, possibly a painting because 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 then you realise these small little ants or these little markings are enormous stone-moving machines or high-rise buildings or something actually huge. But you manage to bring that outright accuracy and detail and focus into something that is actually big. How do you do that?


EB: By and big I've utilized super high-resolution digital electronic cameras for the particular shots. You can likewise lock drones up in the air, it'll hold the cam even if it's windy up there; it will constantly be correcting for being buffeted. And after that with that accuracy, with that capability to hold it there, I can use a longer lens and do a group of shots of that topic. I'm managing the high-resolution video camera through a video on the ground - the video camera might be 1000 feet away - and then I can thoroughly shoot all the frames that I require to later on sew together in Photoshop. Most of my work is single shots on high-resolution video cameras. The electronic camera I utilize 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 share with photojournalism is that there's a narrative behind it. There's a story behind it. I would say that I lead with the art but whatever that I'm photographing is linked to this concept of what we human beings are doing to transform the planet. So that's the overarching narrative, whether it's wastelands or waste disposes, mines or quarries.


GV: You do likewise photo some natural landscapes, there is this kind of repeating pattern that quite often what you photo nearly looks natural because it has those natural patterns in it like repeating circles from farming monocultures or irrigation 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 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 historical referrals, whether it's abstract expressionism or other shared concepts with painting. I'll take a look at a specific subject, then hang out on how to approach it. What am I going to link it into so that it appears in a way 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 motion, I don't think I would make these pictures.


GV: It's nearly a translation, you're seeing these system modifications and you're explaining it to people in their language, in a familiar language that they already understand from the culture that they understand - various artistic movements.


EB: To me, it's fascinating to state, '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 saying, 'Oh, this is the 18th-Century direct, perfectly composed method - a deadpan technique to photographing - for instance, the pyramids. I'm going to use that, since the shipbreaking lawns in Bangladesh require this technique.'


GV: I simply desired to talk to you about the idea - something that you're getting at with your images - this concept that we are living now in this human-changed world but however we are naturally depending on the Earth for whatever and we're all adjoined. I question how far a photograph can go to describing that incredibly complex 3D principle of interconnectedness?


EB: Among the important things that photography and documentary filmmaking can do is expose these things again and once again. It can reveal them, go to locations 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 areas that we're all dependent on, oil fields and copper mines and cobalt mines. I believe it's more compelling that method. People can soak up information much better than reading - images are actually beneficial as a sort of inflection point for a much deeper conversation. I do not believe they can offer responses, but they can certainly lead us to awareness, and the raising of awareness is the start of modification.


With my photography, I'm can be found in to observe, and my work has actually never been about the individual, it's been about our cumulative effect, how we jointly rearrange the world, whether or infrastructure or dams or mines.


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


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