A warning from the wastelands

A warning from the wastelands

Edward Burtynsky famously photographs industrial devastation. Now he's getting to do something about it, GUY DIXON writes

By GUY DIXON

Globe and Mail, Thursday, April 7, 2005 Page R1

In one photograph, a river of phosphorous orange trails off from a nickel mine in Sudbury. In another, canyons of used tires create a threatening, black topography over a piece of land in California. Along China's Yangtze River, a lone figure is photographed picking over a city demolished for the Three Gorges Dam project.

Phrases like the "industrial sublime" and "symphonic decay" have been used to describe Edward Burtynsky's monumental images of industrial wastelands. By showing this "negative land," as Burtynsky describes it, the images have a certain ambiguity. There's an awe-inspiring beauty in such terrifying devastation.

Burtynsky himself, though, is much less ambiguous in his own views about the environment and sustainability, especially with three new programs he is championing.

"The news is out. The climate's changing. Our conspicuous waste is starting to have an effect. Our lifestyles are not sustainable. I think the message is starting to sink in for large groups of the population," Burtynsky says. "So now, how do we proceed?"

 

In February, the Toronto-based Burtynsky, one of Canada's most important photographers, was given the chance to have three wishes granted by some of today's most powerful companies. Along with the activist-singer Bono and the biomedical inventor Robert Fischell, Burtynsky is a winner of the inaugural prize given out at the TED conference, an annual think-tank convention of high-tech companies and major corporations in Monterey, Calif. (TED stands for technology, entertainment and design.) One of his wishes is to create an Imax film similar to his photographs. It's easy to imagine his aesthetic rendered on Imax, and he has already had interest from various companies wanting to help fund the film project and offer other assistance. Actual filming is likely still years away, Burtynsky says.

Yet his other two wishes raise interesting questions about whether Burtynsky still sees himself primarily as an artist, or as an activist.

One of his wishes is to promote the fast-growing weblog Worldchanging.com into a major Internet site for discussing sustainability issues -- from Kyoto-level policy debates about the environment to the most pragmatic of topics, such as how to dispose of certain household wastes.

His third wish is to create a national contest called "In My World . . . ," in which preteens can compete for large prizes (such as computer labs for their schools) by creating environmental projects for their homes, schools and communities. An additional prize will be given for a child's winning artwork used to promote the contest and the cause. Ultimately, Burtynsky would also like to create a package of materials, including books such as Dr. Seuss's The Lorax, to help teachers incorporate the contest into their curriculum.

Corporate heavyweights, from Dell and Hewlett-Packard to Sony, Walt Disney and the advertising giant Publicis, have said they are interested in helping. Canadian companies have been slower to express interest, although Burtynsky says he is talking to Petro-Canada.

But how does this change Burtynsky's role as an artist? Does his activism alter the way in which his photographs should be seen? Their focal point has always been environmental degradation. But as works of art, they were open to interpretation. Has that changed?

No, he argues. "I feel like I'm an artist going in with a particular penchant for industrial landscapes and industrial settings. I've taken a lifetime to develop this way of seeing the world, and I have this body of work behind me," says Burtynsky, who recently turned 50.

"It's a choice that the corporations still have to make," he says of the question of whether or not they allow him to photograph their industrial sites. Many companies probably agree because his images "can be read in multiple ways. So you could have the same image in a boardroom and, frankly, the image could also be used for a poster campaign for an environmental group. It can still resonate with both of those groups. I try to place the work in that kind of ambiguous zone."

Otherwise, without those ambiguities, he says, it would be like putting out a statement declaring himself an environmentalist and announcing that this or that industrial site is bad and that the land should be saved. This would make his photographs more polemic or photojournalistic, which is something he is trying to avoid.

The kind of large-format cameras Burtynsky uses slows down the picture-taking process and make his approach more methodical and artistically driven than straight reportage, he explains. If he used a 35-millimetre camera, that could allow him more versatility to pull back a little and get more of a journalistic or human story -- which, again, he doesn't want.

"It isn't the human story that I'm following. I'm following the things that they make, the things that they build," he says, sitting in his office adjacent to Toronto Image Works, the high-end photo-developing company and darkroom facility that he opened in the mid-1980s, a few years after graduating from Ryerson University.

Part of the attraction for Burtynsky to industrial sites, he says, is that he worked in heavy industry as a young man, including summer jobs with auto-makers and tool plants in and around St. Catharines, Ont., where he was born and raised, and at a gold mine in Red Lake, in northwestern Ontario. In high school, he thought he would become a tool and dye maker.

"If you're a writer, they say to go write about the things you know. As a photographer, I had seen those things and had always thought it would be great to go back and photograph these places."

What Burtynsky shows in his photographs is the before and after: the mines and oil fields from which resources originate and the industrial junkyards where the waste is dumped. He is less interested in the middle ground, our own world in which those resources are consumed. Yet it's that middle ground and the thinking of us consumers that Burtynsky is now targeting with his three wishes.

But old habits die hard. In talking about his cause, he's still pragmatic.

"When I shoot an oil field, I understand that I live within a contradiction, because I arrive at that oil field in a car, using oil and burning gasoline. It's our everyday existence. I got to that oil field in a jet. I realize that everything I'm doing is absolutely engaged with and part of the problem," he says. The smell of photography chemicals wafting through his office is also a reminder that Burtynsky himself works within an industry with its own toxins.

His view is based more on "taking stock, standing back and having a sobering second look at where we are going." Focusing for so long in his career on wastelands "gives me more and more a sense of foreboding as to where it is we're going," and his recent work on the rapid industrial development of China "really makes me think we're going outside the envelope here now," he adds. This month, he will make his fifth shooting trip to China, recording its industrial expansion, for a book set to be released this fall.

Burtynsky isn't out to alienate one group or another, he insists. Like his photographs, he isn't set on blaming businesses. He's more interested in bringing everyone together to find solutions. As he says, "A depleted and dead planet is bad for business."