Extraction: minerals and carbon: oil

Summary

In the past decade Canada's Edward Burtynsky has risen to prominence as one of the world's most accomplished photographers. His largescale works are both aesthetically engaging and impressive in their lucid depiction of massive human interventions upon the landscape. Yet they never let the social and environmental costs slip out of sight. While Burtynsky respectfully acknowledges our collective accomplishments, he reminds us of the steep price we pay for unbridled material wealth. If Huxley's warning of a ‘superlative catastrophe’1 fell on deaf ears in 1928 (after all, industry was roaring along, and the wealthy readers of the article in Vanity Fair were wallowing in dividends) Burtynsky's stark picture of a ravaged Earth, coming almost a century later, should gain firmer purchase on minds alarmed by the mounting evidence of climate disruption For several decades the photographer has been providing a constant stream of compelling proof: from vast piles of abandoned tyres to blasted rock faces that strip the vegetation off entire mountains, to tracts of land denuded of flora and fauna and criss-crossed by rivers of waste. Burtynsky has been demonstrating just how profoundly we are altering the face and body of our planet. That he manages to delight the eye, while simultaneously planting seeds of doubt, is a sign of his consummate skill as an artist.

As a member of the generation of photographers that followed in the footsteps of the ‘New Topographers’, Burtynsky decided early on that the kinds of photographs depicting pristine environments were simply anachronistic. The era of the sublime – at least in its natural manifestations – was over. Foreign tourists may think of Canada, the photographer's birthplace, as a place of untrammelled natural beauty, but Burtynsky was brought up in a heavily industrialized part of the country. His moment of epiphany came not in some high mountain pass or remote lake, but driving through Pennsylvania, where he came upon a bleak place called Frackville. ‘I was surrounded by hills of coal slag,’ he recalled some years later. ‘White birch trees were growing up through the black mounds, and ponds were full of lime green water. It was surreal. Slowly I turned 360 degrees and in that entire horizon there was nothing virgin. It totally destabilized me. I thought, is this Earth? The pictures I took in Frackville sat as contacts for almost a year.