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

9 May 2023
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Gaia VinceFeatures correspondent


Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky discusses his shocking and all of a sudden superb images - 'a prolonged lament for the loss of nature' - with Gaia Vince.


For more than 40 years, the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has taped the effect of people on the Earth in large-scale images that frequently resemble abstract paintings. The writer Gaia Vince, whose book Nomad Century was released in 2022, spoke with Burtynsky for BBC Culture about his newest project, African Studies.


Gaia Vince: With your images we see the outcomes of our consumption practices or our lifestyles, in our cities. We see the outcomes of that far, far away 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 thought that would be truly interesting to follow. Overall it's been a decade-long task, researching and after that photographing in 10 countries. 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 equipment wasn't working due to the fact that we were 400 feet listed below sea level. So the drone GPS was saying: 'You're not expected to be here. You're at the bottom of the ocean'. We had to switch off our GPS since we could not get it to adjust, it didn't understand where it was.


The Danakil Depression is a vast location covering about 200km by 50km. It's referred to as one of the hottest places worldwide and has been described as 'hell on Earth'. I have actually never ever worked in temperature levels over 50C. During the night, it was 40C - even 40 is nearly intolerable. And we were sleeping outdoors because there are no structures, 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 required that we carry all our heavy devices while climbing jagged rocks for about 1.5 km.


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


EB: That was! Yeah, it is typically and you're working with both the late night light and the morning light. So you're working both ends of the day and you really don't get a lot of rest in between that due to the fact that to get to the place in the 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 need to do. When I'm in that area, I'm similar to, 'here's the issue, here's what I desire to do, what's it going to take?'


GV: Africa is the last big continent that has big amounts of wilderness left. Partly due to the fact that of manifest destiny and other extractive industries from the Global North, the industrial transformation in Africa is taking place now. So there's this juxtaposition in between that wild landscape and these very synthetic landscapes that people have created - 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 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, etc.


It resembles financial manifest destiny. I don't think they desire full control of these countries. They desire an economic benefit, they want the resources and they want 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 likewise saw your amazing photos from the shoe factory in Ethiopia. It looks totally shifted from China to Africa.


EB: A few of the pictures 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 storage facilities. They developed 54 of these sheds, with the street. So you can take a look at that image - with the roadways, with the lighting, with the plumbing, with everything. All done, begin to complete, 54 of these were built within one year - all the structures were brought by ship and then by rails into Ethiopia and set up like a Meccano set. And when I existed, they were filling these sheds with stitching machines and textile makers.


GV: The commercial transformation started in England and the factories of the North, and still if we dig down, it's simply totally contaminated soils and landscapes, and then 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 frequently say that 'this is the end of the road'. We're meeting completion of globalisation and where you can go. And it has to leave China because they're gagging on the pollution. Their water's been completely contaminated. The labour force has stated: 'I'm not going to work for inexpensive wages like this anymore.'


So rather the Chinese are training fabric workers - generally female - in Ethiopia, and Senegal, and within 2 or three months, those girls are behind stitching makers and on par with Chinese 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 families and after that 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've been following globalism but I started with the entire concept of just taking a look at nature. That's the classification where I started, the idea of 'who's paying the cost for our population growth 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 cost is being paid, you understand, and they're all being pressed back. These are all the natural environments in the world that we used to exist together with, that we're now absolutely overwhelming in such a way. So nature's at the core - and all my work is actually sort 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 attempting to prompt modification?


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


I believe all my work, in a way, is showing us at work in 'company 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 people, wishing to have more and more of what we in the West have'. I understood 40 years earlier, when I began taking a look at the population development, and I got a possibility to see the scale of production, that this is just going to get larger. Our cities are only going to get more huge.


I decided to continue taking a look at the human growth, the footprint, and how we're reaching worldwide, pressing nature back to build our factories, to build our cities, to farm - we live on a limited world.


Going back to your initial question, I think the term 'revelatory' versus 'accusatory' has actually always been something that I'm comfy with, because I'm pulling the curtain back and stating, 'Look, guys, you know, we can still turn this ship around if we're smart about it. But failing that, we're betting. We're betting the world.'


GV: What do you think the odds are?


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


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


And I think that's something that your images really reveal. They bring a more planetary perspective, but they bring it in such a way that we don't usually get to see. And one of the reasons for that is that they are genuinely a various perspective. There is a bird's eye view there, an aerial shot, so we see something that we may only glance 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 capacity to do that, if you comprehend 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 greatest resolution of any retina of any animal in the world, and scientists are unpacking it to comprehend how to make sensing units for cams. In a comparable way, photography makes whatever sharp and present all at once. Seeing my work at scale, as big 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 person working in the corner.


GV: That is the amazing power of your pictures - there is this substantial scale. And at initially, it's like an artwork - it looks creative, abstract, maybe a painting due to the fact that you can choose out patterns. And after that you begin to realise: 'Actually no, this is something that's either natural or it's human made'. And then you understand these tiny little ants or these little markings are enormous stone-moving machines or skyscrapers or something really big. But you manage to bring that absolute accuracy and detail and focus into something that is truly huge. How do you do that?


EB: By and big I have actually used incredibly high-resolution digital 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 after that with that accuracy, with that ability 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 cam through a video on the ground - the video camera could be 1000 feet away - and then I can thoroughly shoot all the frames that I require to later 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 pictures are extremely painterly - do you see yourself more as an artist or more as a photojournalist?


EB: I type 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 everything that I'm photographing is linked to this concept of what we people are doing to change the planet. So that's the overarching narrative, whether it's wastelands or waste dumps, mines or quarries.


GV: You do also photo some natural landscapes, there is this type of repeating pattern that on a regular basis what you photograph practically looks natural because 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 happen 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 referrals, whether it's abstract expressionism or other shared ideas with painting. I'll look at a specific subject, then hang around on how to approach it. What am I going to connect 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 likewise shares in art history? If abstract expressionism never ever happened as a movement, I do not believe I would make these pictures.


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


EB: To me, it's fascinating to state, 'I'm going to use 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, beautifully composed method - a deadpan method to photographing - for example, the pyramids. I'm going to use that, since the shipbreaking backyards in Bangladesh call for this method.'


GV: I simply wished to speak 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 nevertheless we are naturally based on the Earth for whatever and we're all adjoined. I question how far a photograph can go to discussing that exceptionally complex 3D principle of interconnectedness?


EB: Among the important 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 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 depending on, oil fields and copper mines and cobalt mines. I believe it's more engaging that method. People can take in details better than reading - images are actually helpful as a kind of inflection point for a deeper discussion. I do not think they can provide answers, however they can definitely lead us to awareness, and the raising of consciousness is the beginning of modification.


With my photography, I'm can be found in to observe, and my work has actually never had to do with the person, it's been about our cumulative impact, how we collectively rearrange the world, 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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