John Grande: What made you decide to start your photo lab, Toronto Image Works?
Ed Burtynsky: After graduating from Ryerson Polytechnic there was no access to professional darkrooms in Toronto. After four years of working at home in the basement, I realised how inefficient my production was and how impossible it became to realise the quality and scale of prints I envisioned. That was the original inspiration for Toronto Image Works. I decided to create something that would support not only my own creative printmaking, but also to open a facility for other artists in the city to use.
One often hears of an artist dealing with the sacred earth as a subject, and though that is fine, this brand of art can be diminished by its avoidance of world problems caused by production, pollution, toxic earth, global warming.
My early work looked at the pristine landscape in Canada and the United States, but after a couple of years of doing that I realised it was not enough. I wanted to probe much deeper, into the nature and visual result of our impact on the planet.
Your Quarry photos are fascinating, for the consecutive cut lines resemble the classical architecture of Roman amphitheatres, or in the case of the Vermont quarries, modernist architectural forms. But all this you find in nature. This is outdoors, rational, and these sites were once untamed nature. How strange, this admixture of the pictorial tradition and industrial sublime in your photography.
And in architectural appearance they are articulated in negative rather than positive space. This can best be seen in the Rock of Ages series where the channelling and blasting-out of the blocks of stone have created imitation cliff-palaces, like faux Mesa Verdes, uninhabitable habitats - complete with ladders reaching from ledge to ledge.
Your Shipbreaking photographs from Bangladesh are taken in a Third World setting. They record a Third World industry devoted to taking apart ships that were once an integral part of the capitalist empire. The ship sections standing on shore are truly beautiful, rusted, textural and look like modernist sculptures. They even remind one of Richard Serra or David Smith sculpture. There is a strange, Romantic, quasi-colonial quality to your photos. We sense the photographer is a voyeur, a traveller, a temporary visitor to these sites. There is something of the nineteenth-century travel photographers who captured views from distant lands for the people back home. One thinks of William Henry Jackson, Antonio Beato, Henri Bèchard, or William Notman.
Yes, there is something of that in my work. It often involves expeditions, where I have two or three people who travel with me. I have a scout go on reconnaissance before me, so before I arrive at a site I know what the subject is, what locations are good, what permits are required, etc. And I hire as many as I need locally to get the job done. I have worked with as many as seven or eight people on such projects.
Another stunning series you have done that is likewise sculptural is your Densified Scrap Metal photos from Hamilton, Ontario. We are looking at compacted cubes of metal, but they are so varied and colourful, your photos capture the art in the every day - like abstract expressionism meets the ready-made. This is conceptual sculpture made with entropy built into it.
When I first began the series it was more like a pure documentary project, but as I worked through the process, I noticed that at certain distances, the object’s usage remained apparent, an oil drum or a filter... yet it also resonated with an abstract quality that made an intriguing visual statement as well, without losing site of its origins.
Your visual documents of waste processing, and toxic sites are beautiful. There is no question about it. But, what drew you to that subject? What brought you to investigate those things in such depth?
To see the landscape transformed in such an extreme way was the driving force for that work. The photographer Charles Sheeler was one of the first to recognise a strange beauty in the destruction of nature. It was definitely not accepted in the 1920s. It is still not a very popular point of view, even in the present, but it is a necessary one, that needs to be addressed.
You don’t develop a dialogue by saying to somebody 'That is very ugly'. That doesn’t open a dialogue. It actually closes it. I find that the kind of push-pull that happens, where you are drawn into something and realise you are enjoying something you shouldn’t be enjoying, sets up an uneasy kind of contradiction. For me, that contradiction exists in the work, and I’m aware of it, but it’s the same contradiction as I feel as a human being in our time...
... like an irradiated landscape with nuclear waste in the soil. You can walk on it, but it can kill you if you are overexposed. In artistic terms it can be limiting. Romanticism as typified by Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, was constricted by the parameters that defined it.
I was exposed to Caspar David Friedrich in 1976. What I realised was that nature was somehow segregated from the human condition. The Romantics actually invented nature, and in part because they saw the industrial revolution coming. They realised nature was threatened by this evolution and so they reinvented nature. Nature became a nostalgic kind of thing for the Romantics, and Henry David Thoreau followed.
These notions of beauty and of a sublime nature were digested, filtered, and refined... a puritan ethic was added to the formula...
...and Nature was this pure form that was being destroyed by the machine and the industrial revolution. But in our times the mechanical age has actually moved to the Third World. If you want to see the effects of industry they are there in the Third World. Car companies are producing millions of cars per year there. Cars are being shoved into cities that cannot handle them. These cities also have no pollution controls as yet. On another front, I recently went on a trip with experts on the far north. You think of the Arctic as a kind of pure place. The Inuit women have what they call POG (Persistent Organic Pollutants) and scientists believe they are arriving there from Asia, through the air currents.
The Arctic is even more polluted than elsewhere?
That’s right. The Inuit have the most highly toxic mothers’ milk on the planet. The pollutants are coming into the food chain through seals, and they have also found that it is pervasive throughout the Arctic landscape. Again, we think of this as one of the last pristine places on the planet but it is one of the worst, despite its appearance.
So many artists work hard at expressing ideas. I am not sure if it even liberates them in the end. It could be a kind of prison.
Someone originally referred to my work as a subliminal activism. Something that is not overt, but that says, 'What are we doing?' and that questions where we are going. Art does not provide an answer. It is far more complex than that. It is political. It is scientific. It is a whole series of layered meanings. What art can now do is present an individual perception about what is actually going on. One actually begins to see things, and understand the world in a way that clarifies in ways that words cannot. The object is not to be liberated it is to simply show what exists.
In your photos of Los Angeles autoroutes, we see tendons of highway extending out and spreading. There is very little potential for re-adaptation or remodeling of these transport routes. Some planners see a flow of cars and refer to them as a bloodstream. This is a very different analogy or comparison to make, as highways, if they are bloodstreams, must be so polluted they would kill the host body. I do not understand such analogies. The automobile is actually destroying the organism.
If we think of the arteries of a highway as the bloodstream, then a traffic jam must be like bad cholesterol! When you look at how much real estate is eaten up by highway systems in Los Angeles it is amazing. We are actually destroying the host. That is a more accurate description of what we are doing. These things are of great interest to me. They have to do with transport, and how our need of ground transport has transformed the landscape. I want to take the idea of oil, gas and cars to provide the impetus for the creation of a series of images that describe how we have reshaped our environment to accommodate this new mass-mobility. Highways are a perfect example of this, so right now I’m also investigating large thoroughfare structures like cloverleafs, a.k.a spaghetti junctions, where major highways intersect.
In your latest book of China photographs (published by Steidl) there is this incredible sense of scale, and of the dramatic shift taking place in Chinese society. Whether it is the Three Gorges Dam, or Bao steel, now the world’s largest steel producer, or the seemingly infinite interior scale of factories like Cankun, Yu Yuan or Deda, the scenes you capture are relentless and incredible.
I am looking at the unprecedented scale of China’s urbanisation, the creation of new cities, urban renewal...
... and doesn’t production inevitably result in great waste and destruction of resources, at a scale never imagined in previous decades?
I’m following the exported computer waste, or e-waste as it makes its way into small towns in China for disassembly and recycling. And I am also seeking out gigantic manufacturing locations and their accompanying workforces.
*The complete text of John Grande's interview with Edward Burtynsky, and others with artists from across the world forum are available in his new book, Dialogues in Diversity - Art from the Marginal to Mainstream published by Pari Publishing (Italy)
N O T E S
Born in 1955, Burtynsky’s large-format colour photographs of man-altered landscapes have been exhibited at numerous public venues including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Albright Knox Gallery, New York, LA. County Museum of Art, California, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the McMichael Canadian Collection and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. His images have appeared in various periodicals, among them: Art in America, Art News, The Smithsonian, Harpers, Flash Art, Blind Spot, Artforum, Saturday Night and Canadian Art. Edward Burtynsky is represented by Mira Godard in Toronto; Paul Kuhn, Calgary; Charles Cowles, New York; Robert Koch in San Francisco and Flowers East in London, England.
LINKS
www.paripublishing.com
www.grandescritique.com
www.flowerseast.com
