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

9 May 2023
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Gaia VinceFeatures reporter


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


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


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


Edward Burtynsky: I read that China was starting to offshore to Africa, and I thought that would be truly intriguing to follow. Overall it's been a decade-long job, researching and then photographing in 10 nations. I began in Kenya, and after that Ethiopia, then Nigeria, and then I went to South Africa.


GV: I saw that you went to the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia - inform me about that.


EB: All our drone devices 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 supposed to be here. You're at the bottom of the ocean'. We needed to shut off our GPS since we couldn't get it to calibrate, it didn't understand where it was.


The Danakil Depression is a huge location covering about 200km by 50km. It's called among the hottest places worldwide and has actually been described as 'hell on Earth'. I've never operated in temperature levels over 50C. In the evening, it was 40C - even 40 is practically excruciating. And we were sleeping outdoors since there are no buildings, there are no interior spaces. We invested 3 days there shooting; in the mornings we would get up and then 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 up jagged rocks for about 1.5 km.


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


EB: That was! Yeah, it is typically 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 actually do not 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 usually an hour and a half before that occurs. But you do whatever you need to do. When I remain in that area, I'm simply like, 'here's the problem, here's what I wish to do, what's it going to take?'


GV: Africa is the last huge continent that has large amounts of wilderness left. Partly because of colonialism and other extractive markets from the Global North, the industrial revolution in Africa is occurring now. So there's this juxtaposition in between that wild landscape and these very artificial landscapes that human beings have developed - 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 huge rush for oil pipelines to be entering there. Particularly with China's participation, there are a great deal of plays to build facilities in exchange for access to resources, whether it's for food security, whether it's oil, yellowcake uranium, and so on.


It's like financial manifest destiny. I don't think they desire complete control of these nations. They desire an economic advantage, they want the resources and they desire the opportunity those resources supply. 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 pictures from the shoe factory in Ethiopia. It looks entirely transposed 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 developed what they call sheds, which are more like storage facilities. They built 54 of these sheds, with the road. So you can take a look at that picture - with the roadways, with the lighting, with the pipes, with everything. All done, start to finish, 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 makers and textile makers.


GV: The commercial revolution started in England and the factories of the North, and still if we dig down, it's just completely polluted soils and landscapes, and then 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 place.


EB: I typically state that 'this is completion of the roadway'. We're fulfilling completion of globalisation and where you can go. And it needs to leave China since they're gagging on the pollution. Their water's been totally polluted. The labour force has said: 'I'm not going to work for low-cost incomes like this anymore.'


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 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 device 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 began with the whole concept of simply looking at nature. That's the category where I started, the idea of 'who's paying the price for our population growth and our success as a types?' Broadly speaking, it's nature. It's the animals, the trees, the grassy fields, the wetlands, the oceans - that's where the rate is being paid, you understand, and they're all being pressed back. These are all the natural surroundings in the world that we utilized to exist together with, that we're now completely frustrating in 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 becomes more human-dominated? Or do you see yourself as an activist - are you trying to timely modification?


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


I think all my work, in a manner, is showing us at work in 'company as usual' mode. I'm trying to reveal us 'these are all actual parts of our world that are unfolding every day in order to support what is now 8bn people, desiring to have increasingly more of what we in the West have'. I understood 40 years back, when I began taking a look at the population growth, and I got a possibility to see the scale of production, that this is only going to get bigger. Our cities are just going to get more enormous.


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


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


GV: What do you believe the odds are?


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


GV: I think one of the important things your pictures show us is that we are currently falling. We do not see this damage in our good air-conditioned workplaces in the US or in London. We do not always feel the shock of that fall. But for people who are residing on the edge, who are living in the Niger Delta, for instance, they're currently quite experiencing this fall.


And I believe that's something that your images truly show. They bring a more planetary perspective, however they bring it in a method that we do not typically get to see. And among the factors for that is that they are genuinely a various viewpoint. 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 travel book. 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 use it. But we don't in fact 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 in the world, and researchers are unloading it to comprehend how to make sensing units for electronic cameras. In a similar way, photography makes everything sharp and present simultaneously. 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 working in the corner.


GV: That is the extraordinary power of your pictures - there is this big scale. And in the beginning, it's like an art work - it looks creative, abstract, maybe a painting since you can select 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 realise these tiny little ants or these little markings are massive stone-moving devices or high-rise buildings or something really big. But you manage to bring that outright accuracy and information and focus into something that is truly huge. How do you do that?


EB: By and large I've utilized very high-resolution digital video cameras for the particular shots. You can likewise lock drones up in the air, it'll hold the electronic camera even if it's windy up there; it will continuously be remedying for being buffeted. And after that with that precision, with that ability 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 cam through a video on the ground - the cam 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 electronic cameras. 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 story behind it. There's a story behind it. I would state that I lead with the art but whatever that I'm photographing is connected to this idea of what we human beings are doing to transform the planet. So that's the overarching narrative, whether it's wastelands or waste discards, mines or quarries.


GV: You do also photo some natural landscapes, there is this type of repeating pattern that frequently what you photograph practically looks natural because 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 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 looking at art historic referrals, whether it's abstract expressionism or other shared concepts with painting. I'll take a look at a particular topic, then invest time on how to approach it. What am I going to link 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 took place as a motion, 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 - different artistic movements.


EB: To me, it's interesting 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 take a look at it, throughout my work I'm pulling pages out of minutes in history and saying, 'Oh, this is the 18th-Century direct, wonderfully composed approach - a deadpan technique to photographing - for example, the pyramids. I'm going to utilize that, due to the fact that the shipbreaking backyards in Bangladesh require this technique.'


GV: I simply wanted 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 nonetheless we are of course reliant on the Earth for everything and we're all interconnected. I question how far a photo can go to describing that incredibly complicated 3D principle of interconnectedness?


EB: One of the things that photography and documentary filmmaking can do is reveal these things once again and 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 based on, oil fields and copper mines and cobalt mines. I believe it's more compelling that method. People can soak up info much better than reading - images are really helpful as a kind of inflection point for a much deeper conversation. I don't believe they can provide answers, however they can certainly lead us to awareness, and the raising of consciousness is the beginning of change.


With my photography, I'm can be found in to observe, and my work has actually never been about the person, it's had to do with our collective impact, how we collectively rearrange the world, whether structure cities or facilities or dams or mines.


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


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