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 stunning and all of a sudden superb images - 'an extended lament for the loss of nature' - with Gaia Vince.


For more than 40 years, the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has actually recorded the effect of humans on the Earth in large-scale images that often look like abstract paintings. The author Gaia Vince, whose book Nomad Century was published in 2022, spoke with Burtynsky for BBC Culture about his most current task, African Studies.


Gaia Vince: With your pictures we see the outcomes of our usage habits or our way of lives, in our cities. We see the results of that far, far away in a natural landscape made unnatural by our activities. Can you inform me about African Studies?


Edward Burtynsky: I was checking out that China was starting to offshore to Africa, and I believed that would be truly intriguing to follow. Overall it's been a decade-long job, researching and then photographing in 10 countries. I began in Kenya, and then 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 equipment wasn't working due to the fact that 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 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 area covering about 200km by 50km. It's referred to as one of the hottest places in the world and has been described as 'hell on Earth'. I have actually never operated in temperature levels over 50C. In the evening, it was 40C - even 40 is almost intolerable. And we were sleeping outdoors due to the fact that there are no structures, there are no interior spaces. We spent three days there shooting; in the mornings we would get up and then drive as far as 25km to get to our places. One such location was Dallol, a volcanic hellscape of sulfurous springs. Getting to it needed that we bring all our heavy devices while climbing up jagged rocks for about 1.5 km.


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


EB: That was! Yeah, it is often 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 due to the fact that to get to the location in the morning with that early light, you need to be up typically 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 much like, 'here's the issue, here's what I desire to do, what's it going to take?'


GV: Africa is the last huge continent that has large amounts of wilderness left. Partly due to the fact that of manifest destiny and other extractive markets from the Global North, the industrial transformation in Africa is occurring now. So there's this juxtaposition in between that wild landscape and these extremely artificial landscapes that human beings have developed - how do you comprehend 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 huge rush for oil pipelines to be going in there. Particularly with China's involvement, there are a lot of plays to develop infrastructure in exchange for access to resources, whether it's farmland for food security, whether it's oil, yellowcake uranium, etc.


It's like financial manifest destiny. I do not think they want complete control of these nations. They desire an economic benefit, they desire the resources and they want the opportunity those resources supply. For instance, 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 photos from the shoe factory in Ethiopia. It looks entirely shifted from China to Africa.


EB: Some 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 storage facilities. They constructed 54 of these sheds, with the street. So you can take a look at that image - with the highways, with the lighting, with the pipes, with whatever. All done, start to finish, 54 of these were constructed 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 sewing machines and textile makers.


GV: The commercial revolution started 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 countries and so on ... That cycle is hitting Africa. But where is it going to be offshored next? We can't simply keep offshoring. There isn't another location.


EB: I typically state that 'this is the end of the roadway'. We're satisfying completion 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 completely polluted. The labour force has stated: 'I'm not going to work for low-cost incomes like this any longer.'


So instead the Chinese are training fabric employees - generally female - in Ethiopia, and Senegal, and within 2 or 3 months, those ladies 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 away from their families and after that 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've been following globalism however I began with the entire idea of simply taking a look at nature. That's the classification where I began, 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 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 environments on earth that we used to exist together with, that we're now totally frustrating in a manner. So nature's at the core - and all my work is truly 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 trying to timely change?


EB: Well, I would not say activist - someone once pointed out 'artivist' and I liked that much better. 'Activist' seems to lean more into the direct political discourse - I don't desire to turn my work into an indictment, a two-dimensional type of blunt tool to state, 'this is incorrect, this is bad, cease and desist'. I don't believe it's that easy.


I believe all my work, in such a way, is showing us at work in 'business 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 individuals, wishing to have a growing number of of what we in the . I comprehended 40 years ago, when I started looking at the population development, and I got an opportunity to see the scale of production, that this is just going to get bigger. Our cities are only going to get more enormous.


I chose to continue taking a look at the human expansion, the footprint, and how we're reaching worldwide, pressing nature back to build our factories, to construct our cities, to farm - we reside on a limited planet.


Returning to your original question, I think the term 'revelatory' versus 'accusatory' has constantly been something that I'm comfortable 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 clever about it. But stopping working that, we're betting. We're betting the planet.'


GV: What do you think the odds are?


EB: The Canadian environmental researcher David Suzuki once stated it truly well. He used the metaphor of Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner - how all of an unexpected the Road Runner can make a dogleg however Wile E. doesn't 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 concern is, are we going to fall 10 feet or 500 feet?'


GV: I believe among the important things your photos show us is that we are already falling. We do not see this damage in our great air-conditioned workplaces in the US or in London. We do not always feel the shock of that fall. But for individuals who are living on the edge, who are residing in the Niger Delta, for example, they're already 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 such a way that we do not normally get to see. And among the reasons for that is that they are truly a various point of view. There is a bird's eye view there, an aerial shot, so we see something that we may just glimpse in a news reel or an image in a travel book. They bring it in, in such 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 use it. But we do not really 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 worldwide, and scientists are unloading it to comprehend how to make sensing units for video cameras. In a similar method, photography makes everything sharp and present simultaneously. Seeing my work at scale, as huge prints, you can stroll up to them and you can take a look at the tire tracks and you can see the little truck or individual working in the corner.


GV: That is the remarkable power of your photos - there is this substantial scale. And in the beginning, it resembles an artwork - it looks artistic, abstract, possibly a painting because you can select out patterns. And after that you start to realise: '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 machines or high-rise buildings or something really big. But you manage to bring that absolute accuracy and detail and focus into something that is truly substantial. How do you do that?


EB: By and big I've utilized incredibly high-resolution digital electronic cameras for the particular 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 fixing for being buffeted. And then with that accuracy, with that capability to hold it there, I can utilize 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 electronic camera might be 1000 feet away - and then I can carefully shoot all the frames that I require to later on sew together in Photoshop. Most of my work is single shots on high-resolution cams. The electronic camera I use now is 150-megapixel.


GV: Your images are extremely 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 linked to this concept of what we human beings are doing to transform the world. So that's the overarching story, whether it's wastelands or waste dumps, mines or quarries.


GV: You do also photo some natural landscapes, there is this kind of repeating pattern that on a regular basis what you photograph practically looks natural since 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 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 looking at art historic references, whether it's abstract expressionism or other shared ideas with painting. I'll take a look at a particular subject, then hang out 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 ever took place as a motion, I don't think I would make these photos.


GV: It's practically a translation, you're seeing these system changes 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 creative movements.


EB: To me, it's interesting to say, '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 moments in history and stating, 'Oh, this is the 18th-Century direct, wonderfully composed approach - a deadpan approach to photographing - for circumstances, the pyramids. I'm going to utilize that, because the shipbreaking lawns in Bangladesh call for this technique.'


GV: I just desired to speak 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 however nevertheless we are obviously depending on the Earth for whatever and we're all adjoined. I question how far a photograph can go to describing that extremely complex 3D idea of interconnectedness?


EB: Among the things that photography and documentary filmmaking can do is expose these things once again and again. It can reveal them, go to locations where typical people 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 based on, oil fields and copper mines and cobalt mines. I think it's more engaging that method. People can take in information better than reading - images are really helpful as a sort of inflection point for a much deeper discussion. I do not believe they can offer answers, however they can definitely lead us to awareness, and the raising of consciousness is the beginning of change.


With my photography, I'm coming in to observe, and my work has actually never been about the person, it's had to do with our collective impact, how we jointly reorganize the world, 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 till 20 May 2023.


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