“I use a digital camera in a helicopter or airplane,” says Edward Burtynsky. “It moves fast and it’s bouncy and shaky, and I take hundreds of pictures because if something comes your way and you don’t get it, you’ll never get back to it, no matter how good the pilot is. You have to be ready to take that shot when it happens. If you miss it, that’s it.”
The 68-year-old Canadian photographer, the great chronicler of how heavy industry is transforming our planet, is at home in The Blue Mountains, Ontario, and explains how he’s gone from taking painstaking shots on a tripod with a large format camera, like the old days pioneers like Ansel Adams, to embrace new technology. “Suddenly it was eureka,” he says. Yet the precision he learned as a young man still shapes every image, and it’s something a generation raised on camera phones wouldn’t understand. “In the late ’80s it cost me about $60 to take one photo. I walked around with an eight-by-ten camera, sometimes for two or three days, and wouldn’t take a picture if the light wasn’t right. But I made notes: ‘Okay, come back here at six o’clock.’”
The hardest part – the fun part – he says, was finding a photo worth taking; the rest was a puzzle to be solved about the best conditions to capture it. ‘It’s impossible to imagine why anyone today would even want to have that discipline. It’s so easy to take photos and there’s no charge. I often caught myself doing that, and I said, “Stop. You know better than that. Wait for the right moment.”
This goes some way to explaining something that will become clear when the largest ever exhibition of Burtynsky’s work – Extraction/Abstraction – opens at London’s Saatchi Gallery next month. The images on display are some of the most ‘painterly’ works of art you are likely to see this year. A river in Ontario turns fauvist orange due to iron oxide, salt pans in Gujarat dissolve into geometric patterns and compressed oil barrels recreate the density of the Abstract Expressionists.
They are beautiful – and Burtynsky has sometimes been criticized for that beauty, because they are a document of how the Earth is being poisoned by industry, from the snow swirl of phosphates in a Florida pond to the psychedelic toxic spill destroying the Niger Delta.
For more than forty years, Burtynsky has been concerned with humanity’s impact on the environment, beginning in the early 1980s when he traveled across North America for four months with a Canadian government grant of about £10,000. “just me, my car and my camera and my thoughts,” photographing rock walls being blasted for railway lines to cut through. From the beginning he realized that the idea was ‘big enough’ for a life’s work. Now he is one of the most important artists to document the effects of the “Anthropocene” – the era of human dominance over the planet.
He understands the anger of radical climate activists who go so far as to advocate sabotage against the oil industry’s infrastructure. “It’s a well-placed anger,” he says. “We cannot let a small group of very wealthy people, who have an interest in preserving that wealth, determine the outcome of all life on the planet.” But Burtynsky also does not emphasize that we should think naively: “we can switch from dependence on fossil fuels to alternative energy in one short period: that is impossible.” Such a shift should prevent ‘the fabric of society from being destroyed. If we destroy economies, and people can’t put a roof over their heads, then the environment doesn’t exist. It’s like, who cares? It’s my survival. If that’s the last pigeon and I can eat it, shoot the pigeon. Cease and desist is the naive position.”
It also extends to industry. “The whole greening of the economy means that we will be doing more mining than ever before,” he says. “Lithium mining, cobalt mining, and then copper, nickel, iron ore, all these things are critical – I just went to photograph a rare earth mine – because we need the material to build the batteries and the cars and motorbikes and all that stuff. things that will electrify our world.”
He’s talking via video call from his home in one of Canada’s top ski destinations, which is about to see snow for the first time this winter. So far, “it’s just been raining,” he says, “an insane amount of rain.” However, the snowstorm put his plans for today on hold. “I was going to go to my mom’s,” he says, but instead, “I just stay home and eat whatever’s left in the fridge.”
Burtynsky’s mother Mary will turn 100 in July. She is a survivor of the 1932-33 Holodomor in Ukraine, one of the most horrific crimes of the 20th century, in which millions of people died from famine under Stalin. Grain from the region was used to feed the rest of the Soviet Union, but was not distributed locally. “My mother talked about going to bed hungry,” he says, “and going out [food] day to day.” She saw people starving. During World War II, her village was occupied by the Nazis and she was sent to Germany as a slave laborer, ending up in a displaced persons camp in Canada after the war. She later became a committed voice for Ukraine’s independence from Russia.
It was Burtynsky’s father, Peter – also a Ukrainian immigrant – who gave his son his first camera and later set up a darkroom at home, sparking the teenager’s passion for photography. During the day he worked on the welding line at the General Motors car plant in Toronto. It would lead to his death, when Burtynsky was only fifteen. His father got cancer, the photographer thinks, from working with PCBs: electrically insulating oils that are carcinogenic and can be absorbed through the skin. “Almost all the men who worked on that line died,” he says. “He got cancer when he was 40 and then had a kidney removed, but by the time he was 43 the disease returned and he died when he was 45.”
Burtynsky later got a summer job removing PCBs from the factory to earn money to study photography. During his father’s illness, Burtynsky had taken on work outside of school to help support the family. “When my father was dying, he said: ‘you are the eldest man in the family, this is your family now’. By the time I was 20, I’d probably had 20 different jobs.”
Burtynsky achieved early success, winning gallery representation in New York while still in his twenties. But he soon realized that even artists he admired had to take other work to support themselves. He opened a photographic laboratory in Toronto that continues to function well to this day, but consumed all his energy for years until a collector finally asked when he was going to take more photographs. Burtynsky had an idea to shell quarries, but could not spare the time. “And he just said, ‘I’ll pre-purchase everything you do.’” It relaunched his career.
It is important to be able to sell your work, he emphasizes. “I didn’t want to be dependent on subsidies. I didn’t want to be dependent on individuals.” But does the commercialism of the art world limit its ability to be radical? “There is an art class – call it the Jeff Koons or the [Damien] Hirst [class], where the billionaires’ game creates a store of value in art, and someone tells them you need 10 percent of your wealth in art because it produces a big return. He is not, he emphasizes. “I’ve always kept my work at a very accessible point in terms of dollars. Some galleries say, ‘We’re really going to limit the work you do, release five or six images a year, that’s all, but we want six figures or more to sell the work.’ I’ve always avoided that. I have always put pressure on myself to stay true to the way I want to work.”
In the early 1990s, larger prints of Burtynsky’s work could be purchased for around £1,500; today the smaller prints sell for about ten times that. But larger prints and what are considered iconic works can reach high prices at auction, up to $100,000 (about £80,000). The market for his photos helps him travel the world, rent a helicopter when necessary, or hire assistants in environments where he doesn’t speak the language. Burtynsky is “pretty persistent” when it comes to gaining access, although some projects still elude him. For example, he never managed to penetrate the Grasberg mine in Indonesia, where gold is mined at an altitude of 3,000 meters. And years of trying to get permission to shell Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar oil field led to the Ministry of Industry expressing concern that his work is not very positive for the industry.
It’s “hard to be positive” about climate change, he says. “We were slow to respond to the scale of the problem. Time is no longer our friend.” What does he think of the Just Stop Oil protesters targeting galleries? “Museums are repositories of things from the past that we find valuable and want to preserve, and of things from the present that we find important and want to preserve. Using that space for protests is harmful to the cultural fabric. It’s just for headlines, and you know, here’s something that society finds valuable – and I’m not going to respect that value. I do not agree with it.”
Finding fault with the way museums maintain themselves also needs to be carefully considered, he says. “Cultural institutions often live on the mercy of individual donations, government support and corporate donations,” he says. “Culture has never been able to sustain itself.” At some level – like having a loan from a particular bank, or an insurer with ties to fossil fuels – “they’re all in on it,” and that includes each of us. “The choice is difficult. If every artist and arts organization worldwide denies immensely valuable funding, at some point there is a distinct risk that they will be starved.” He suggests that the energy of protesters should be “redirected to the thresholds of the most egregious.”
What about those who believe that global warming is overhyped or not even happening? “I think the problem is that it’s been politicized,” he says, and “the political system is, no matter what the left says, the political right just has an allergic reaction to it and says the opposite. I’ve always said: left or right, it doesn’t matter, if a hurricane comes, everyone will be crushed.”
Burtynsky: Extraction/Abstraction is at the Saatchi Gallery, London SW3 (saatchigallery.com) from February 14 to May 6