DoorZine: Since the 1980s, your work has focused on nature as it is transformed by industry. Your approach is global: you have carried out projects in North America, India, Bangladesh, Asia, Australia, Europe, and Russia. In the book and documentary Manufactured Landscapes (2003 and 2006), you examine the effects of industrialization on the environment, allowing the public to understand the origins of the consumer goods they use daily as well as the scale of the landscape transformations resulting from our pursuit of progress. You have said that your project is a way of “looking at the industrial landscape as a way of defining who we are and our relationship to the planet.”

What place do your series made in China—particularly those on the site of the Three Gorges Dam—hold within the broader context of your work?

Edward Burtynsky: My work in China was produced at a time when the Chinese industrial “machine” was accelerating and providing inexpensive products to the entire world. For me, this was a very clear sign of how the twenty-first century was beginning to unfold. Considering the massive and constantly expanding size of the global market, I turned my attention to China to observe the enormous scale of the industrial systems the country was developing, with a particular interest in resource extraction, the manufacturing and transport of huge quantities of goods, and the recycling of waste from around the world—all on an unprecedented scale.

DoorZine: In this series, your images show destruction, construction, and the transformation of the landscape more than the fate of the people whose lives have been affected by the dam. Human beings are almost absent from your photographs. Why is that?

That is not entirely accurate. There are many images in my Three Gorges series that include people. But with regard to the images in which people are not the central focus, I was more concerned with the manifestation of human presence and with the way human hands transform the landscape on a colossal scale—an extension of the conceptual project that drives my entire photographic practice. I am most interested in humanity through the expression of large-scale industrial “systems”—the damage inflicted on the planet by human beings in order to achieve growth and progress at any cost.

DoorZine: You emphasize that your work is neither a glorification nor a critique of industry. By creating beautiful and striking images, you aim to make the public aware of the impact of their way of life on the environment and to raise awareness about the consequences of human action on the landscape. What, for you, is the function of art and photography?

For me, the function of art is to awaken consciousness… to provide new information, to help people think about what they see from practical, spiritual, and aesthetic perspectives. In my case, it is about the potential consequences of our greedy actions on the planet. It is very important to me that my work engage in a deep dialogue with the public—first visually, and then, from that starting point, to show them something they have never seen before, in the service of better understanding and, I hope, greater participation in the conversation we need to have about the state of global ecology.

Doorzine: In your preface to the book Anthropocene (Steidl, 2018), you write:

“My understanding of deep time and our relationship to the geological history of our planet dates back to my early passion for nature. (…) Our planet has witnessed five major extinctions. (…) These were natural phenomena linked to the evolution of life. Today, it is becoming clear that humanity—with its population explosion, its industry, and its technology—has also become, in a very short period of time, a colossal agent of change on a global scale. (…) I see my interest in the Anthropocene—the indelible marks left by the human species on the geological face of our planet—as a conceptual extension of my earliest and most fundamental obsessions as a photographer.”

How do you apply this theoretical framework to your artistic practice? Has it changed the form of your work? Your Anthropocene project is presented as “a multidisciplinary body of work combining photography, film, virtual reality, and scientific research to explore humanity’s influence on the state, dynamics, and future of the Earth.”

When I think back to my beginnings, I always remember an assignment given to me by my teacher and mentor during my photography studies: “the evidence of man.” That assignment actually became the focal point of my entire career. The Anthropocene project is simply the continuation of an exploration that has guided my whole life—the search for evidence left by human beings in their quest for progress. This project has indeed also allowed me to experiment with new forms. Diversifying formal approaches—using augmented reality, film installations, or photographic murals incorporating scientific data—is simply, for me, a way of diving even deeper into the creative process of image-making and of communicating my original intention to the public.

Interview conducted by Victoria Jonathan & Bérénice Angremy.

Read the full interview with Edward Burtynsky in the bilingual French–Chinese catalog of the exhibition Flowing Waters Never Return to the Source, available for purchase starting July 15, 2020 on the Bandini Books website.

To learn more about Edward Burtynsky’s work:
Website: edwardburtynsky.com

Social media: Instagram, Facebook

Edward Burtynsky is represented by Nicholas Metivier Gallery (Toronto) and Flowers Gallery (London).