9 May 2023
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Gaia VinceFeatures reporter
Canadian professional photographer Edward Burtynsky discusses his startling and all of a sudden superb pictures - 'an extended lament for the loss of nature' - with Gaia Vince.
For more than 40 years, the Canadian professional photographer Edward Burtynsky has tape-recorded the impact of people on the Earth in massive images that typically look like abstract paintings. The author Gaia Vince, whose book Nomad Century was released in 2022, spoke with 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 away in a natural landscape made abnormal by our activities. Can you tell me about African Studies?
Edward Burtynsky: I read that China was starting to offshore to Africa, and I believed that would be really intriguing to follow. Overall it's been a decade-long job, investigating and after that photographing in 10 nations. I began in Kenya, and after that Ethiopia, then Nigeria, and after that I went to South Africa.
GV: I noticed that you went to the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia - tell 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 stating: 'You're not supposed 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 know where it was.
The Danakil Depression is a huge area covering about 200km by 50km. It's called one of the most popular locations on the planet and has actually been described as 'hell on Earth'. I have actually never worked in temperatures over 50C. In the evening, it was 40C - even 40 is nearly unbearable. And we were sleeping outdoors because 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 required that we carry all our heavy equipment 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 frequently and you're dealing with both the late night light and the early 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 area in the early morning with that early light, you need to be up usually an hour and a half before that takes place. But you do whatever you require to do. When I remain in that area, I'm similar to, 'here's the issue, here's what I wish to do, what's it going to take?'
GV: Africa is the last big continent that has big quantities of wilderness left. Partly due to the fact that of manifest destiny and other extractive markets from the Global North, the commercial revolution in Africa is occurring now. So there's this juxtaposition in between that wild landscape and these really artificial landscapes that humans have created - 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 great deal of plays to build facilities 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 want full control of these nations. They want an economic benefit, they want the resources and they desire the opportunity those resources provide. For instance, the Chinese own the largest deposit of uranium yellowcake in all of the African continent - I photographed that mine.
GV: I also saw your unbelievable photographs from the shoe factory in Ethiopia. It looks totally transposed from China to Africa.
EB: Some of the photos 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 road. So you can take a look at that picture - with the streets, with the lighting, with the plumbing, with whatever. All done, start to complete, 54 of these were built 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 was there, they were filling these sheds with stitching devices and fabric makers.
GV: The industrial revolution began in England and the factories of the North, and still if we dig down, it's simply entirely contaminated 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 just keep offshoring. There isn't another location.
EB: I often state that 'this is the end of the roadway'. We're fulfilling the end 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 totally contaminated. The labour force has actually said: 'I'm not going to work for cheap earnings like this any longer.'
So instead the Chinese are training textile employees - mainly female - in Ethiopia, and Senegal, and within two or 3 months, those women are behind stitching devices and on par with Chinese production rates and what they would've expected out of a Chinese factory. That's their goal. And they're training these young 16, 17-year-olds, taking them far from their families and then putting them right into the stitching machine sweatshop.
GV: At the heart of your images, they're extremely political, aren't they?
EB: Well, I have actually been following globalism however I began with the entire idea of just taking a look at nature. That's the classification where I started, 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 prairies, the wetlands, the oceans - that's where the price is being paid, you understand, and they're all being pushed back. These are all the natural surroundings in the world that we utilized to coexist with, that we're now absolutely overwhelming in a manner. So nature's at the core - and all my work is actually kind of an extended 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 trying to timely modification?
EB: Well, I wouldn't state activist - someone as soon as discussed 'artivist' and I liked that much better. 'Activist' appears to lean more into the direct political discourse - I do not wish to turn my work into an indictment, a two-dimensional type 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 method, is showing us at work in 'service as typical' mode. I'm attempting to reveal us 'these are all real parts of our world that are unfolding every day in order to support what is now 8bn individuals, wanting to have more and more of what we in the West have'. I understood 40 years ago, when I began looking at the population development, and I got an opportunity to see the scale of production, that this is only going to get larger.