The impressive photos that show the scars of landscapes changed by people

For more than 40 years, Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has been documenting humanity’s impact on the earth in large-scale images that often resemble abstract paintings.

The writer Gaia Vince, whose book “Nomad century‘ was published in 2022, he interviewed Burtynsky for BBC Culture about his latest project, African Studies, which have now been collected in a book.

All image credit: Edward Burtynsky, Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto/Flowers Gallery, London

With your photos we have seen the results of our consumption habits or our lifestyle in our cities, but also in natural landscapes. Can you tell me about African studies?

I read that China was starting to operate in Africa, and I thought it would be very interesting to see what happened.

It’s been a ten-year project, researching and then shooting in 10 countries. I started in Kenya, then Ethiopia, then Nigeria, then South Africa.

Tell me about your experiences in the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia.

All our drone equipment didn’t work because we were 120 meters below sea level. The drone’s GPS said, “You’re not supposed to be here. You’re at the bottom of the ocean.’

The Danakil Depression is a vast area measuring approximately 200 km x 50 km. It is one of the hottest places in the world and is known as “hell on earth”.

I have never worked at temperatures above 50 °C. At night it was 40°C, even that is almost unbearable. We slept outside because there are no buildings, there are no indoor spaces.

We were shooting there for three days; every morning we drove up to 25km to get to the sites.

One of them was Dallol, a volcanic hell of sulphurous springs. To get there, we had to lug all our heavy gear up as we climbed about a mile of jagged rock.

Africa is the last major continent with still large amounts of wildlife. Partly due to colonialism and other extractive industries from the global north, the industrial revolution is now taking place in Africa. How do you see it?

The African continent still has a lot of desert left, and there are many resources, such as the oil discovery in Tanzania and in northern Kenya and other places.

There is a great rush to build pipelines, especially with China’s involvement.

And many maneuvers to build infrastructure in exchange for access to resources, be it farmland for food security, or oil, yellow cake (uranium oxide), etc.

It’s like economic colonialism: I don’t think they want complete control over these countries. They want an economic advantage, your resources and the opportunity they provide.

For example, the Chinese have the largest stock of yellowcake on the entire African continent: I photographed that mine.

I also saw your great photos of the shoe factory in Ethiopia. It seems completely transposed from China to Africa.

Some photos were taken in Hawassa, an 80,000 m2 Special Economic Zone, just like Shenzhen in China.

The Chinese built 54 sheds, roads, lighting, plumbing… everything, from start to finish, in one year.

All structures were brought to Ethiopia by ship and then rail and built as a Meccano set.

And when I went, they were filling those sheds with sewing machines and weaving machines.

The industrial revolution started in England and the factories in the north of the world, and then it moved to poorer countries… Now it’s hitting Africa. But where is he going now? There is no other place.

I often say ‘this is the end of the road’.

They had to leave China because they are suffocating on pollution, and the staff said, ‘I’m not going to work for such low wages anymore.’

So the Chinese are training textile workers, mostly 16, 17 year old women, in Ethiopia and Senegal.

In the space of two or three months, these girls, separated from their families, are trapped in a workshop behind sewing machines and at the same level as Chinese production.

That’s your goal.

Deep down your images are very political, aren’t they?

I followed globalism but started with the idea of ​​just looking at nature.

I started with ‘who pays the price for our population growth and our success as a species?’

In general, it is nature. It’s the animals, the trees, the grasslands, the wetlands, the oceans; there the price is paid.

They are all natural environments of the planet we lived with, but we are overwhelming.

So nature is at the center of all my work, which is actually a kind of long-standing lament about the loss of nature.

Do you see yourself as an activist, trying to bring about change?

I wouldn’t say activist. Someone once said ‘artist’ and I liked that better.

‘Activist’ seems to lean more towards a direct political discourse: I don’t want to turn my work into an accusation, a sort of two-dimensional blunt instrument for saying, ‘This is wrong, this is bad, stop it.’ I don’t think it’s that simple.

I try to show parts of our world that are evolving every day to support the now 8 billion people who want more and more of what we have in the West.

I understood 40 years ago when I started looking at population growth and had a chance to see the scale of production that this was only going to get bigger.

I decided to continue looking at human expansion, how we reach the whole world, push nature back, but we live on a finite planet.

I think the term “revealer” versus “prosecutor” has always made me more comfortable in the sense that I pull back the curtain and say, “Look, we can still turn this ship around if we’re smart.” We bet on the planet’.

Photography makes everything sharp and present at the same time.

When you see my work to scale, as large prints, you can walk up to it and you can look at the tire tracks and you can see the little truck or the person working on the corner.

Your photos are very visual. Do you see yourself more as an artist or more as a photojournalist?

I walk that line. What I share with photojournalism is that there is a story behind it.

I would say my rudder is art, but everything I shoot is linked to this idea of ​​what we humans are doing to transform the planet, so that’s the overall story.

He also photographs some natural landscapes, and often landscapes, such as repeated circles of agricultural monocultures, which appear natural because they have patterns found in plants and natural river systems.

I start from art, so I look for historical references to art, be it abstract expressionism or other ideas shared with painting.

I look at a particular subject and then spend time on how to go about it.

If Abstract Expressionism had never existed as a movement, I don’t think I would have made these images.

We live in a world changed by humans, but we depend on the earth for everything and we are all connected. I wonder how far a photo can go to explain that complicated concept of interconnectedness.

One of the things photography and documentary film can do is reveal that over and over again.

It can show you places ordinary people wouldn’t normally go and take you to the areas we all depend on.

People are better at absorbing information than reading it – images are very useful as a kind of turning point for a deeper conversation.

I don’t think they can provide answers, but they can certainly lead us to consciousness, and consciousness is the beginning of change.

With my photography I observe, and my work was never about the individual, it was about our collective impact.