Edward Burtynsky’s disturbingly beautiful photography brings a giant’s eye view to our ravaged planet, rendering mining sites as glimmering jewel boxes, desertscapes as geometric puzzles and dumping grounds as Jackson Pollock-like eruptions of chaos and colour. This fascinating exhibition covers his journey of more than 40 years — hanging out of Cessna planes, elevated by cranes and latterly deploying drones — to document the way large-scale industry and agriculture have impacted on the natural world.
Burtynsky’s distinctive aesthetic has spawned several imitators, but none who match the scale or impact of his uncompromising vision. Born in Ontario, Canada, to Ukrainian parents who had survived Stalin’s famine, the Holodomor, he was given his first camera — a 35mm Minolta — by his factory-worker father. His father would die, aged 45, from cancer that his doctors said was caused by the electrical insulating oils (PCBs) that he used on the welding line at the General Motors plant in the industrial town of St Catharines. It took Burtynsky until his mid-twenties to decide that he would make the insidious effects of industry his central theme, though it’s intrinsic to his work that there’s nothing dogmatic or condemnatory about what he shows.
Instead, what you’re most likely to feel is a sense of wonder as you enter the first room of the Saatchi Gallery’s Extraction/Abstraction, judiciously curated by Marc Mayer, the former director of the National Gallery of Canada. The first image, with its striking blobs of colour, could be a work by the Swiss-German modernist Paul Klee or a mutating virus, but when you read the caption you discover that it’s “Salt Ponds #1, Near Fatick, Senegal” (2019). The egg-yolk yellows and luscious greens are produced by salt-resistant micro-organisms that change colour as the salt concentration increases.
This defiant, often provocative exhibition — the largest survey of his work to date, produced in collaboration with Flowers Gallery in London — covers two floors of the gallery and is divided into five sections: Abstraction, Agriculture, Extraction, Manufacturing & Industry and Waste. In the first gallery, Burtynsky pares the images down to lines and shapes — so that, for instance, ploughed earth in “Farming #4, Cingil, Ankara Province, Türkiye” (2022) resembles grooves on a vinyl record, while grass looks like stitched felt. In “Tailings Pond #2, Wesselton Diamond Mine, Kimberley, Northern Cape, South Africa” (2018), waste material — kimberlite tailings — from the mine flares out from a conveyor belt like petals on a flower. There’s no prettification here — Burtynsky simply observes and presents what he finds, inviting us to contemplate the paradoxes of a world in which beauty often walks hand in hand with destruction.
As the exhibition continues, the patterns become more complex. When you look at one of the 13 high-resolution murals, “Erosion Control #1, Yeşilhisar, Central Anatolia, Türkiye” (2022), the terraces on the bare hills look like contour lines sketched by assiduous 18th-century cartographers. Another image, “Thjorsá River, Southern Region, Iceland” (2012), is luscious with silvery and emerald greens as a river flowing from an ice-capped active Icelandic volcano displaces eroded soil. “Cerro Prieto Geothermal Station #2, Sonora, Mexico” (2012) — the largest geothermal station in the world, we discover — looks like opulent stained glass with an elaborate gilded frame. Pools on a Gujarat salt farm shimmer like scales on a fish.
While humans are largely absent from these images, we are gently probed to contemplate how complicit we all are in these compromised situations. Maybe it’s the diamond in your engagement ring, the petrol in your car, the lithium battery in your mobile phone or the granite on your kitchen counter. At least one and probably more of the luxuries in your life will involve the systematic destruction of landscape. What’s the point at which you put your hand up and say, “This has to stop”?
Burtynsky is not demanding answers right now — instead he is using beauty as bait to make us think about our complex, interconnected world. While the captions often invite comparisons with modernist artists, he is clearly driven by a profound fascination with industry: its social impact, its machinery, its sheer scale. There’s beauty here too that’s less sinister: bright yellow canola fields offsetting black mountains in Yunnan Province, China, “pivot irrigation” schemes yielding green circles of vegetation in the Arizona desert, the Italian quarry that produced marble for Michelangelo’s “David”. Though the sense of our Promethean contract is never far away, it hangs particularly heavily in his helicopter shots of oil theft in Nigeria, or in the pictures of barefoot men hired to destroy decommissioned oil tankers in Bangladesh.
Part of the fascination is inevitably in Burtynsky’s work process, and one section displays his equipment — whether it’s the sci-fi spider-like Hasselblad H4D 39MP Camera, the DJI Mavic 2 Pro drone, or simply his ideas notepad. The stories behind each picture can be accessed by mobile phone, along with augmented reality features. The immersive film In the Wake of Progress (2022), screened in London for the first time, begins across three screens, contemplating a pristine forest from British Columbia, then suddenly whirling through landscapes blighted by logging, over-farming, oil spillage, snaking road systems, or industrial chemicals that blotch the feet of child-workers.
It would be easy to be overwhelmed, but the curator has paced the exhibition judiciously, allowing for a slow build in intensity and creating a subtle balance between amazement and concern.
What’s most striking, though, is a sense of one man’s determination to discover everything he can about some of the most inaccessible environments on our planet and reveal them as places in which we are all invested. Burtynsky discovers beauty where we least expect it — some of the most ravishing pictures are from the mollusc-like patterns left behind by an extractor machine in a Siberian potash mine. A conceptual and visual tour de force.
To May 6, saatchigallery.com. An accompanying exhibition of new works is at Flowers Gallery to April 6, flowersgallery.com
