“I use a digital camera in a helicopter or airplane,” says Edward Burtynsky. “It moves fast and jumps and shakes and I take hundreds of photos, because if something gets in your way and you can’t figure it out, you can never get back to it, no matter how good the pilot is. When this happens you need to be ready to paint that picture. If you miss it, that’s it.”
The 68-year-old Canadian photographer, the great historian of how heavy industry has transformed our planet, describes how he went from taking painstaking shots on a tripod with a large-format camera to his home in The Blue Mountains, Ontario, as before. Pioneers like Ansel Adams are trying to embrace new technology. “All of a sudden it was a eureka,” he says. But the sensitivity he learned as a young man still influences every image, and that’s something a generation growing up with camera phones may not understand. “In the late 80s it cost me about $60 to take a photo. Sometimes I would walk around with my 8-by-10 camera for two or three days and if the light wasn’t right, I wouldn’t take pictures. But I would make notes: ‘Okay, come here at six o’clock.'”
He says the hard part—the fun part—is finding a photo worth taking; The rest was a puzzle to be solved as to the best conditions to catch it. “It is impossible to imagine today why anyone would care about having this discipline. Painting is very easy and doesn’t cost anything. I would catch myself doing this and then I would say, ‘Stop.’ You know better than that. Wait for the right moment.”
This seems to explain something that will be revealed when Extraction/Abstraction, the largest exhibition of Burtynsky’s work to date, opens at London’s Saatchi Gallery next month. The paintings on display are some of the most “painterly” works of art you’ll see anywhere this year. A river in Ontario is turned fauvist orange by iron oxide, salt pans in Gujarat turn into geometric patterns, and barrels of compressed oil recreate the intensity of abstract expressionists.
They are beautiful – and Burtynsky has sometimes been criticized for their beauty, because they are a document of how the world has been poisoned by industry, from the snow swirl of phosphates in a Florida pond to the psychedelic toxic spill that destroyed Niger. Delta.
Burtynsky has focused on humanity’s environmental impact for over 40 years; From the early 1980s, in return for a grant from the Canadian government of nearly £10,000, he spent four months touring North America, “just me and my car” and my camera and my thoughts, photographing rock faces blasted to accommodate railway lines. He was aware from the beginning that this was “a big enough idea” for a lifetime’s work. He is now one of the most prominent artists to have captured the effects of the “Anthropocene,” the era of human domination over the planet.
He understands the anger of radical climate activists who have gone so far as to advocate sabotage of the oil industry’s infrastructure. “This is well-placed anger,” he says. “We cannot allow a small group of very wealthy people who have a vested interest in maintaining this wealth to control the outcome of all life on the planet.” However, Burtynsky insists that we should not naively think that: “We can switch from fossil fuel dependence to alternative energy in a short time: this is impossible.” Such a change must avoid “destroying the fabric of society.” If we destroy economies and people can’t keep a roof over their heads, then there is no such thing as the environment. Like who cares? This is my survival. If this is the last pigeon and I can eat it, shoot the pigeon. To stop and give up is naive.”
It also extends to industry. “The full bloom of the economy means we will be mining more than ever before,” he says. “Lithium mining, cobalt mining, and then copper, nickel, iron ore, these are all very important – I just went to photograph a rare earth mine – because we need the material to make batteries, cars, motors and other things that will electrify our world.”
He’s video chatting from his home in one of Canada’s top ski resorts, where it’s snowing for almost the first time this winter. So far “it’s just rained,” he says, “an incredible amount of rain.” However, a snowstorm put their plans for the day on hold. “I was supposed to go see my mom,” she says, but instead “I’m going to stay home and eat what’s left in the fridge.”
Burtynsky’s mother, Mary, will be 100 in July. He is a survivor of the 1932-33 Holodomor in Ukraine, one of the most heinous crimes of the 20th century, in which millions died of starvation 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 and eating,” she says. [food] day by day.” He watched people starve to death. During World War II, his village was occupied by the Nazis and he was sent to Germany as slave labor and remained in a displacement camp in Canada after the war. He later became determined to ensure Ukrainian independence from Russia It has become a voice.
Burtynsky’s father Peter, himself a Ukrainian immigrant, gave his son his first camera and later set up a darkroom at home, sparking the youngster’s passion for photography. During the day, he worked on the welding line at the General Motors automobile plant in Toronto. This would lead to his death when Burtynsky was just 15 years old. The photographer believes his father developed cancer from working with PCBs, which are electrical insulating oils that are carcinogenic and can be absorbed through the skin. “Almost all the men working on this line are dead,” he says. “He had cancer at the age of 40 and had his kidney removed, but when he was 43 his kidney reappeared and he died at the age of 45.”
Burtynsky then found a summer job removing PCBs from the factory to earn money to study photography. During his father’s illness, Burtynsky began working in addition to school to support the family. “When my father was dying, he said, ‘You are the oldest man in your family, this is your family now.’ “By the time I was 20, I had probably done 20 different jobs.”
Burtynsky found early success, gaining gallery representation in New York while still in her 20s. But he soon realized that even the artists he admired had to do other jobs to make a living. He opened a photography laboratory in Toronto that is still going strong today – but for a few years it drained all his energy, until a collector finally asked him when he would produce more photographs. Burtynsky had the idea of setting fire to the quarries, but could not spare the time. “And he said, ‘Whatever you do, I’ll pre-buy it.’” This restarted his career.
He emphasizes that being able to sell your work is important. “I didn’t want to rely on grants. “I didn’t want to rely on individuals.” But does the commercialism of the art world limit its capacity to be radical? “There is an art class; call it Jeff Koons or [Damien] Hirst [class]“Where the billionaires’ game is to create a store of value in art, and someone tells them you should keep 10 percent of your assets in art because it has a great return.” “This isn’t him,” he insists. “I’ve always kept my business very accessible in terms of dollars. Some galleries say, ‘We’re going to really restrict what you do, we’re going to publish five or six pictures a year, that’s it, but we want six figures or more for the work to sell.’ I’ve always avoided this. I always put pressure on myself to stay true to the way I wanted to work.
In the early 1990s larger prints of Burtynsky’s works could be purchased for around £1,500; these days smaller prints sell for around ten times that. But larger prints and works considered iconic works can fetch prices as high as $100,000 (about £80,000) at auction. The market for his photographs helps him travel the world, rent a helicopter if necessary, or hire an assistant in environments where he doesn’t speak the language. Although some projects still elude him, Burtynsky is “pretty persistent” about gaining access. For example, it was never able to enter the Grasberg mine in Indonesia, where gold is mined at an altitude of 10,000 ft. Trying to get permission to strike the Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia for years led the Ministry of Industry to express concerns that their work was not very positive for the industry.
He says it’s “hard to be positive” about climate change. “We have been slow to respond to the scale of the problem. Time is no longer our friend.” What does he think about Just Stop Oil protesters targeting galleries? “Museums are repositories of things from the past that we find valuable and want to preserve, and that we feel are important and want to preserve today. Using this space for protests is damaging the cultural fabric. It’s just for the headlines and you know it’s here.” “There is something that society finds valuable, and I will disrespect that value. I don’t agree with that.”
He believes that flaws in the way museums support themselves also need to be carefully considered. “Cultural institutions often survive on individual donations, government support and corporate donations,” he says. “The culture was never able to sustain itself.” At some level – such as getting a loan from a particular bank or an insurer with ties to fossil fuels – “they are all in it” and in fact each of us is in it. “The choice is difficult. “At some point, if every artist and arts organization around the world turns down extremely valuable funding, there is an undeniable risk that their existence will cease to exist.” He suggests that the protesters’ energy be “shifted to the doorstep of the worst.”
What about those who believe that global warming is exaggerated or is not happening? “I think the problem is that it’s politicized,” he says, “and the political system, no matter what the Left says, the political Right has an allergic reaction to it and says the exact opposite. I’ve always said, Left or Right, it doesn’t matter, when a hurricane comes, everyone gets destroyed.” .”
Burtynsky: Subtraction/Abstraction at the Saatchi Gallery, London SW3 (Saatchigallery.com) From February 14 to May 6. Edward Burtynsky — New Works at Flowers Gallery, London W1 from 28 February to 6 April