Edward Burtynsky’s new photo exhibit shows all the beautiful, terrifying ways Humans Change the Earth

IN 1976 EDWARD BURTYNSKY attended his first photography class as a young art student in Toronto. His very first assignment: Go out and capture a subject that represented the “evidence of Man.”  

After nearly five decades, copious awards, and countless images of the impact of human life (as we’d now phrase it) it’s safe to say Burtynsky gets a passing grade. “That assignment sort of gave me a hall pass,” the photographer, now 70, says. “I kept thinking as if I were an alien, sent to Earth by some other intelligence to see what we’re doing to the planet. What were the images I’d make to send back to say, Hey, this is what they’re up to?”    

He’s pursued that mission from the pit mines of Pennsylvania to the salt pans of Gujarat, the marble quarries of Italy to the large-scale manufacturing factories of China, with dozens of destinations in between. The resulting images, rendered in huge format, are often surreal, painterly, uncanny. Their otherworldly landscapes have the twin effect of disorienting the viewer while also emphasizing our intimate connections to corners of the globe that usually remain out of sight: A ribbon of water near a nickel mine in Ontario glows orange, at once beautiful and toxic; decommissioned oil tankers loom like ancient monuments on the shores of Bangladesh, where they’re taken to be disassembled; an aerial shot of an Arizona suburb and a neighboring Native American reservation reveals a border as defined and insurmountable as any wall.   

On June 19, New York’s International Center of Photography (ICP) will debut a new career-spanning exhibit of Burtynsky’s work, featuring some 70 images, three high-resolution murals, and a large panorama. The show is titled “Edward Burtynsky: The Great Acceleration,” a term scientists use for the exponential growth of human population and impact on the planet beginning in the mid 20th century. Like a good Canadian, Burtynsky describes this growth curve as “a hockey stick pointing straight up.”  

“It’s technological expansion coupled with human expansion,” he says. “My whole thing has been a meditation on how to represent this through the photograph.”  

Burtynsky looks back on his career, from early inspirations to recent work photographing the aftermath of this year’s devastating Los Angeles fires—images seen for the first time in this National Geographic exclusive.  

This exhibition includes several never before seen images. Can you describe one? 

There’s a panoramic one from a mine in the DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo] that I shot about five or six months ago. It’s a hillside where they dump dry tailings—all oranges and yellows and reds and ochres. Dry tailings are the rocks from mines that don’t have any value, before they get to the valuable rock. But in these dry tailings, there’s cobalt. The local townspeople go in there and gather it and sell it at the end of the day. Almost all phones have cobalt in them—and a lot of that cobalt comes from the DRC. It’s this very interesting reconnection to a landscape that’s outside of our purview but in which each of us participate every day.  

Mines have been a through line of your work since the very beginning. What is it about them that attracts you?  

I worked as a miner in Canada to put myself through school. Twice a day I would walk a mile down stairs into the shaft. I thought it was an interesting place, but I didn’t think it was a subject for the world of art. It was only in 1981, when I bumped into a mining area in Pennsylvania, that I had a eureka moment. Mining is interesting to me, because it’s something we all do—whether it’s mining our talents, or mining our ideas. You take something that is everyday and turn it into something that is valuable. I said to myself, ‘I’m going to do the same thing. I’m going to find a moment in a refinery. I’m going to find a moment in a factory. I’m going to find a moment at a dam in China.’ My whole process has been a process of mining.    

It’s striking that humanity and its effects are all over your work, but there are relatively few humans in the photos. 

It’s funny you say that because in this particular exhibition [curator] David Campany actually included a big section of portraits that I took throughout China, Bangladesh, and other places. I’ve always done portraits, but the work I’ve really wanted to do has been about the collective impact of human effort and human enterprise, written on the landscape. It’s why I photograph big cities versus just somebody on the street in the city.  

If we think of the sublime, in the traditional sense of the word, it’s nature that is the omnipresent force, whether it’s gale-force winds, or a hurricane, or volcano or a ship lost at sea. And we are diminished and in awe of this force. What I started to realize was that we ourselves are becoming sublime. That we are dwarfed by our own creations. We are working at a scale that is changing the planet: We’re diminishing life in the oceans, mountain glaciers are melting, forests are disappearing, and all of that is happening at a rapid pace. It’s like we’ve entered the technological sublime. We’re now small players in the theater of our own making.  

Do you find that overwhelming? Like how do you get up in the morning?  

It’s an observation. What’s the old saying: May you live in interesting times. Well, I’m living in them.  

It does feel as though your life has been perfectly synced to observe this “great acceleration.”  

I think somewhere in the 1800s we hit our first billion people. By the time I was born, in 1955, it was like 2.6 billion. And then, for my whole life, there’s been almost a billion added every decade. I was born in the very epicenter of the baby boom, so in a way I always had confidence that if I just stuck to my guns, eventually people would figure out what I’m doing—that I’m just following this crazy situation. 

When you started out, what artists were you looking to for inspiration? 

I loved Edward Weston—almost more than I liked Ansel Adams. I liked Frederick Sommer. I liked the industrialists, like Albert Renger-Patzsch and Charles Sheeler. I was looking at Frank Gohlke, Robert Adams, and all those guys doing a kind of landscape-as-critique. I loved Casper David Friedrich as a painter. I loved Abstract Expressionism, which I ended up incorporating a lot into my work. The history of painting, the history of photography, music, film… I was just gobbling it all up. It gave me all these ways of thinking about how one can make visuals in the world.  

Have you ever worried that your work may be too beautiful, that the beauty might obscure the message?  

It’s interesting that photography seems to carry this kind of oversized ethical dilemma. No one would ever think of criticizing, for instance, Apocalypse Now, even though [director Francis Ford] Coppola went and made all the frames and lighting and motion and movement too beautiful for the horrific story. Nobody would question Shakespeare’s prose in Richard III or Macbeth, which are both about man’s treachery to fellow man. Using an aesthetic in other forms seems to be less of a question. Ultimately, I wasn’t really in search of beauty, per se, but more in search of wonder: What is going on here? Look at how this comes together!  

As a visual artist, I am going to use color, texture, compositional tools, light…. It’s like breaking into a safe, but you need to find the right combination. And using a large-format camera automatically puts you into an almost formal mindset. You don’t shoot from the hip like Garry Winogrand. You contemplate it. You consider when the light will be right. Where to stand. How to frame it. What lens to use. All those things are like a methodology: a slow and steady and contemplative way in which you approach the subject. When digital and aerial came along, I kept the same principles. Now, even if I’m bouncing around on a helicopter, gyrostabilizing my camera and trying to get the pilot to the right place, the effect should be that I shot it with a tripod. 

Has the prevalence and familiarity of drone shots made it more difficult to create arresting images in that way? 

Somebody told me the other day that there’s something akin to two trillion images a year being taken. Ninety-three percent of those are taken on mobile phones. So, yes, there’s more aerial pictures, but there’s just more pictures. How did people who wrote before the Gutenberg press feel when it showed up? I think at a certain point, it’s less about any individual image and more about how you put it together. It’s the meaning that you’re building. It’s the stories that you’re telling.   

How did you come to take such haunting aerial shots of the aftermath of the recent Los Angeles fires?  

I was in the area for another reason, about three weeks after the fires. I thought about these Santa Ana winds blowing a hundred miles per hour—just the sheer ferocity of what occurred there. I was sort of stunned at the scale of it. I’d never really flown over that amount of human loss. I can only imagine how many families are going to have their lives permanently changed by this. I asked around, and people still didn’t want to attribute it to climate change and the difference in weather patterns. It’s hard to find people to say, Wait a minute, these things are far more vicious and dangerous with the new conditions.  

Given some of the recent discourse between the U.S. and Canada, did you consider not traveling to New York for the exhibition opening?  

No, I’m going to come. I’ve been working toward this exhibition with the ICP for seven or eight years now. And frankly, I think that now more than ever there’s a real importance to keep the conversation going. Our real problems are not going away. You can reverse political problems, you can reverse economic problems, but when things happen to our climate, there’s nothing in our tool kit to reverse that. I know things seem hopeless, but this too shall pass. And when that happens, we’ll still be in that place, asking, What have we done? 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.