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 startling and suddenly sublime photos - 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 frequently resemble abstract paintings. The writer Gaia Vince, whose book Nomad Century was released in 2022, talked to Burtynsky for BBC Culture about his latest project, African Studies.


Gaia Vince: With your photos we see the outcomes of our intake practices or our way of lives, 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 was reading that China was starting to offshore to Africa, and I thought that would be really fascinating to follow. Overall it's been a decade-long project, looking into and after that photographing in 10 nations. I began in Kenya, and after that Ethiopia, then Nigeria, and then 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 since we were 400 feet below water 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 switch off our GPS due to the fact that we couldn't 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 called one of the hottest places on the planet 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 intolerable. And we were sleeping outside due to the fact that there are no structures, there are no interior areas. 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 locations. One such place was Dallol, a volcanic hellscape of sulfurous springs. Getting to it needed that we bring all our heavy devices while climbing jagged rocks for about 1.5 km.


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


EB: That was! Yeah, it is often 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 lot of rest in between that because to get to the location in the early morning with that early light, you have to be up generally an hour and a half before that takes place. But you do whatever you need to do. When I'm in that space, I'm simply like, 'here's the issue, here's what I wish to do, what's it going to take?'


GV: Africa is the last huge continent that has large quantities of wilderness left. Partly due to the fact that of colonialism and other extractive markets from the Global North, the commercial revolution in Africa is taking place now. So there's this juxtaposition between that wild landscape and these extremely artificial landscapes that human beings have created - how do you comprehend that yourself?


EB: The African continent has a lot 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 entering there. Particularly with China's involvement, there are a great deal of plays to develop facilities in exchange for access to resources, whether it's farmland for food security, whether it's oil, yellowcake uranium, etc.


It resembles economic colonialism. I don't believe 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 example, 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 photographs from the shoe factory in Ethiopia. It looks completely 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 constructed what they call sheds, which are more like storage facilities. They developed 54 of these sheds, with the street. So you can look at that picture - with the roadways, with the lighting, with the plumbing, with everything. All done, begin to complete, 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 existed, they were filling these sheds with stitching devices and fabric makers.


GV: The industrial transformation began in England and the factories of the North, and still if we dig, it's just 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 just keep offshoring. There isn't another place.


EB: I frequently say that 'this is the end of the roadway'. We're meeting 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 polluted. The labour force has said: 'I'm not going to work for cheap salaries like this anymore.'


So instead the Chinese are training textile workers - mainly female - in Ethiopia, and Senegal, and within two or 3 months, those girls lag stitching 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 sewing maker sweatshop.


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


EB: Well, I have actually been following globalism but I started with the whole idea of simply taking a look at nature. That's the category where I started, the idea of 'who's paying the rate for our population growth and our success as a species?' Broadly speaking, it's nature. It's the animals, the trees, the prairies, the wetlands, the oceans - that's where the rate is being paid, you understand, and they're all being pushed back. These are all the natural environments on the planet that we utilized to exist side-by-side with, that we're now completely frustrating in a manner. So nature's at the core - and all my work is really 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 attempting to timely change?


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


I believe all my work, in a manner, is revealing us at work in 'organization as typical' 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, wanting to have increasingly more of what we in the West have'. I comprehended 40 years earlier, when I began 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 just going to get more huge.


I chose to continue taking a look at the human growth, the footprint, and how we're reaching around the globe, pushing nature back to develop our factories, to build our cities, to farm - we live on a limited world.


Returning to your original question, I think the term 'revelatory' versus 'accusatory' has always been something that I'm comfy with, in that I'm pulling the curtain back and stating, 'Look, guys, you know, we can still turn this ship around if we're wise about it. But stopping working that, we're gambling. We're betting the world.'


GV: What do you believe the odds are?


EB: The Canadian environmental scientist David Suzuki as soon as stated it really 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 but Wile E. doesn't alter course, he keeps going and runs himself right over a canyon. Suzuki stated: 'We are currently over the air with our feet running. And the only question is, are we going to fall 10 feet or 500 feet?'


GV: I believe among the things your images show us is that we are currently falling. We don't see this destruction in our good air-conditioned workplaces in the US or in London. We don't always 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 pictures really show. They bring a more planetary perspective, but they bring it in a manner that we do not typically get to see. And among the factors for that is that they are really a different point of view. There is a bird's eye view there, an aerial shot, so we see something that we may just look in a news reel or an image in a guidebook. They bring it in, in such 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 do not in fact typically see the world that way, 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 understand how to make sensing units for video cameras. In a comparable way, photography makes whatever sharp and present at one time. Seeing my work at scale, as big prints, you can approach them and you can look at the tire tracks and you can see the little truck or person operating in the corner.


GV: That is the extraordinary power of your images - there is this substantial scale. And initially, it's like an art work - it looks artistic, abstract, perhaps a painting because you can choose patterns. And after that you start to realise: 'Actually no, this is something that's either natural or it's human made'. And then you understand these small little ants or these little markings are massive stone-moving machines or skyscrapers or something actually big. But you handle to bring that outright precision and detail and focus into something that is truly substantial. How do you do that?


EB: By and large I've utilized very high-resolution digital video cameras for the singular shots. You can likewise lock drones up in the air, it'll hold the video camera even if it's windy up there; it will constantly be remedying for being buffeted. And after that 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 electronic camera through a video on the ground - the cam might be 1000 feet away - and then I can thoroughly shoot all the frames that I need to later on sew together in Photoshop. Most of my work is single shots on high-resolution cams. The electronic camera I utilize 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 type 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 idea of what we humans are doing to change the world. So that's the overarching story, whether it's wastelands or waste dumps, mines or quarries.


GV: You do likewise photograph some natural landscapes, there is this type of repeating pattern that frequently what you picture nearly looks natural because it has those natural patterns in it like repeating circles from farming monocultures or watering 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 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 take a look at a particular subject, then spend time on how to approach it. What am I going to connect 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 occurred as a motion, I do not believe I would make these images.


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 comprehend from the culture that they understand - different creative motions.


EB: To me, it's fascinating to say, 'I'm going to utilize photography, but I'm going to pull a page out of that moment 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 method - a deadpan approach to photographing - for instance, the pyramids. I'm going to utilize that, since the shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh call for this method.'


GV: I simply wished 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 nevertheless we are of course depending on the Earth for everything and we're all adjoined. I question how far a picture can go to describing that very complicated 3D principle of interconnectedness?


EB: One of the things that photography and documentary filmmaking can do is reveal these things again and once again. It can reveal them, go to places where average individuals would usually not go, and have no factor to go, like a big open-pit mine. It can take you to the areas that we're all reliant on, oil fields and copper mines and cobalt mines. I think it's more compelling that method. People can soak up details much better than reading - images are actually beneficial as a type of inflection point for a much deeper conversation. I don't believe they can supply answers, however they can certainly lead us to awareness, and the raising of awareness is the beginning of change.


With my photography, I'm being available in to observe, and my work has actually never ever been about the person, it's had to do with our collective impact, how we jointly reorganize the world, whether building cities or infrastructure or dams or mines.


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


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