by “I use a digital camera in a helicopter or an airplane,” says Edward Burtynsky. “It’s moving fast and it’s bouncing and shaking, and I’m taking hundreds of pictures, because if something gets in your way and you don’t get it, you’re never going to get it back no matter how good it is so is the pilot. You need to be ready to take that picture when it happens. If you miss it, that’s it.”
The 68-year-old Canadian photographer, the great chronicler of how heavy industry is changing our planet, is at home in the Blue Mountains, Ontario, explaining how he went from establishing painstaking shots on a tripod with a large format camera as early. pioneers such as Ansel Adams, to embrace new technology. “Suddenly, it was eureka,” he says. But the precision he learned as a young man still informs every image, something a generation that has grown up with camera phones would not understand. “In the late 80s, it cost me about $60 to take one picture. I would walk around with an eight-ten camera, sometimes for two or three days, and not take a picture, if the light wasn’t right. But I would make notes: ‘Okay, come back here at six o’clock’.”
The hard part – the fun part – he says, was finding a photo worth taking; the rest was a puzzle to be solved under the best conditions to catch him. “I can’t imagine why anyone would even be interested in having that control today. It’s so easy to make pictures and it costs nothing. I used to do that – then I’d say, ‘Stop. You know better than that. Wait for the right moment’.”
This explains something that will become clear when the biggest ever show of Burtynsky’s work – Extraction/Abstraction – opens at London’s Saatchi Gallery next month. The images on display are some of the most “painting” artwork likely to be seen anywhere this year. A river in Ontario fauvist is turned orange by iron oxide, salt pans in Gujarat dissolve in geometric patterns, and compressed oil drums recreate the density of the abstract expressists.
They are beautiful – and Burtynsky has sometimes been criticized for that beauty, because they document how industrialization is poisoning the world, from the phosphate snowdrift in a Florida pond to the psychedelic toxic spill that is ravaging Niger . Delta.
For more than 40 years, Burtynsky has focused on the environmental impact of humanity, starting in the early 1980s, when he spent four months traveling in North America on the back of a Canadian government grant of around £10,000, “I , my car. and my camera and my thoughts”, photographing rock faces blasted to cut railway lines through. From the beginning, he recognized that it was a “pretty big idea” for a life’s work. Now he is one of the leading artists who have captured the effects of the “Anthropocene” – the age of human dominance on the planet.
He understands the anger of radical climate activists who go so far as to sabotage the infrastructure of the oil industry. “Anger is good,” he says. “We cannot allow a small group of very rich people, who have an interest in keeping that wealth, to control the outcome of all life on the planet.” But Burtynsky does not argue either, that we should not naively think that “we can switch from dependence on fossil fuel to alternative energy in a short period of time: it is impossible.” Such a change must avoid “damage to the fabric of society. If we destroy economies, and people can’t put a roof over their heads, the environment won’t exist. It’s like, who cares? It is my salvation. If that is the last pigeon and I can eat it, release the pigeon. The naive position is to quit and give up.”
It extends to industry, too. “The complete greening of the economy means we’ll be mining more than ever before,” he says. “Lithium mining, cobalt mining, and then copper, nickel, iron ore, all those things are critical – I just went to photograph a rare earth mine – because we need the material to make the batteries and the build cars and the motors and all the things. things that are going to electrify our world.”
He’s chatting on a video call from his home in one of Canada’s top ski destinations, where it almost snowed for the first time this winter. So far, “it’s just raining,” he says, “a crazy amount of rain.” The blizzard, however, has put his plans for the day on ice. “I was supposed to go see my mom,” he says, but instead, “I’m going to stay home and eat what’s left in the fridge.”
Burtynsky’s mother Mary turns 100 in July. She is a survivor of the 1932-33 Holodomor in Ukraine, one of the most horrific crimes of the 20th century, where millions perished due to famine under Stalin. Grain from the region was used to feed the rest of the Soviet Union, but not distributed locally. “My mother talked about going to bed hungry,” he says, “and walking out [food] day after day.” She watched people starve to death. During the Second World War, her village was occupied by the Nazis and she was sent to Germany as a slave, ending up in a displacement 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 that sparked the teenager’s passion for photography. During the day, he worked on the welding line at the General Motors car factory in Toronto. It would lead to his death, when Burtynsky was only 15. His father developed cancer, according to the photographer, from working with PCBs – electrical insulating oils that are carcinogenic and can be absorbed through the skin. “Almost every man working 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, it came back again 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 worked alongside the school to support the family. “When my father was dying, he said, ‘you are the oldest man in the family, this is your family now’. By the time I was 20, I had probably done 20 different jobs.”
Burtynsky was an early success, winning gallery representation in New York while still in his 20s. But he soon realized that even artists he admired took other work to earn a living. He opened a photography lab in Toronto that’s still going strong today – but over the past few years, he’s drained all his energy, until a collector finally asked when he was going to take more photos. production. Burtynsky had an idea to shoot a stone quarry but he could not spare the time. “And he just said, ‘I’ll pre-buy whatever you do.'” He began his career.
It is important to be able to sell your work, he emphasizes. “I didn’t want to rely on grants. I didn’t want to depend on individuals.” But does the commercialization of the art world limit its ability to be radical? “There is an art class – bring the Jeff Koons or the [Damien] Hirst [class], where the game of billionaires is creating a store of value in art, and someone saying, you need 10 percent of your assets in art because it has a great return.” That’s not it, he insists. “I have always kept my work at a very accessible point in terms of dollars. Some galleries say, ‘We’ll really limit the work you’re doing, we’ll release five or six images a year, that’s it, but we want six figures or more to sell the work.’ I always got away with that. I’ve always pushed myself to stay true to the way I want to work.”
In the early 1990s, larger prints of Burtynsky’s work could be had for around £1,500; these days the smaller prints sell for about ten times that. But larger prints and what are considered iconic works can fetch high prices, up to $100,000 (around £80,000) at auction. The market of his pictures helps him travel the world, rent a helicopter if necessary, or hire assistants in environments where he does not speak the language. Burtynsky is “pretty persistent” about getting access, although he still has a few projects left. He has never been able to enter the Grasberg mine in Indonesia, for example, where gold is mined at an altitude of 10,000 feet. After years of trying to get permission to shoot the Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia, the Ministry of Industry expressed concern that his work is not very positive for the industry.
It is “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 it make of the Just Stop Oil protesters who target galleries? “Museums are repositories of things from the past that are valuable and we want to preserve, and things in the present that we feel are important and that we want to preserve. It damages the cultural fabric to use that space for protests. It’s just about headlines, and, you know, here’s something of value to society – and I’m going to ignore that value. I don’t agree with it.”
Finding fault with how museums support themselves also needs to be looked at carefully, according to him. “Cultural institutions often survive by the grace of individual donations, government support, corporate donations,” he says. “Culture has never been able to sustain itself.” At some level – for example having a loan with a particular bank, or an insurer with links to fossil fuels – “they’re all caught up”, and indeed, so are all of us. “The choice is difficult. At a certain point, if every artist and arts organization in the world is denied invaluable funding, there is no denying the risk of starvation.” He suggests that the energy of the protests should be transferred “to the doorsteps of the most important people”.
What people believe that global warming is overhyped or not even happening? “The problem, I see, is that it has 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 vice versa say. I’ve always said, Left or Right, it doesn’t matter, when a hurricane comes, everybody goes flat.”
Burtynsky: Extraction/Abstraction is at the Saatchi Gallery, London SW3 (saatchigallery.com) from 14 February to 6 May
