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THE LONG VIEW Edward Burtynsky's quest to photograph a changing planet.
I love this Burtynsky. I'm still kicking myself for not going to his gallery when I was in Toronto three and a half years ago. What was I thinking?
OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS
DECEMBER 19 & 26, 2016 ISSUE
THE LONG VIEW Edward Burtynsky’s quest to photograph a changing planet.
By Raffi Khatchadourian
Our helicopter was heading over the Niger Delta, across a vast and unstable sky, with gray clouds surging above. I was sitting behind the pilot, and behind me, gazing out a starboard window, was Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian photographer known for his sweeping images of industrial projects and their effects on the environment. For three decades, he has been documenting colossal mines, quarries, dams, roadways, factories, and trash piles—telling a story, frame by frame, of a planet reshaped by human ambition. For one seminal project, sixteen years ago, he travelled to Bangladesh to shoot decommissioned oil tankers that were being ripped apart by barefoot men with cutting torches. Those images of monumental debris—angular masses that appear to emerge from sediment like alien geology—remain transfixing. Carefully choreographed, shot in hazy and ethereal light, they echo the sublime power of a Turner landscape even as they portray a reckoning with garbage.
Burtynsky had hired our helicopter for four hours, at a rate of two dollars per second, to document the ravages of oil theft in the estuaries along Nigeria’s southern coast. Since crude was discovered in Nigeria, in 1956, it has brought wealth and corruption, impoverishment and armed conflict—a global symbol of squandered possibility. “Wherever there is oil, especially in developing countries, by and large there is a lot of pilfering, and society doesn’t really enjoy the profits,” Burtynsky had told me. “In the Niger Delta, the pushback from the have-nots has been to go in there and start pirating the oil.” In recent years, parts of the delta have taken on the atmosphere of a war zone: hidden among mangroves and low bush, villagers and local militias have established countless makeshift distilleries to refine crude stolen from pipelines, while dumping tons of oleaginous waste back into the ground. The government has estimated that two hundred and fifty thousand barrels are stolen daily, but nobody really knows. Last year, Nigeria’s newly elected President, Muhammadu Buhari, vowed to end the theft, noting, “The amount involved is mind-boggling.”
....
Burtynsky seeks moments when the view of a landscape falls into order: “You try to let the subject tell you where it is.”
“OIL BUNKERING #2, NIGER DELTA, NIGERIA 2016” / PHOTOGRAPH BY EDWARD BURTYNSKY
....
PHOTOGRAPHS © EDWARD BURTYNSKY, COURTESY NICHOLAS METIVIER GALLERY, TORONTO / HOWARD GREENBERG GALLERY AND BRYCE WOLKOWITZ GALLERY, NEW YORK
Raffi Khatchadourian became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 2008.
DECEMBER 19 & 26, 2016 ISSUE
THE LONG VIEW Edward Burtynsky’s quest to photograph a changing planet.
By Raffi Khatchadourian
Our helicopter was heading over the Niger Delta, across a vast and unstable sky, with gray clouds surging above. I was sitting behind the pilot, and behind me, gazing out a starboard window, was Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian photographer known for his sweeping images of industrial projects and their effects on the environment. For three decades, he has been documenting colossal mines, quarries, dams, roadways, factories, and trash piles—telling a story, frame by frame, of a planet reshaped by human ambition. For one seminal project, sixteen years ago, he travelled to Bangladesh to shoot decommissioned oil tankers that were being ripped apart by barefoot men with cutting torches. Those images of monumental debris—angular masses that appear to emerge from sediment like alien geology—remain transfixing. Carefully choreographed, shot in hazy and ethereal light, they echo the sublime power of a Turner landscape even as they portray a reckoning with garbage.
Burtynsky had hired our helicopter for four hours, at a rate of two dollars per second, to document the ravages of oil theft in the estuaries along Nigeria’s southern coast. Since crude was discovered in Nigeria, in 1956, it has brought wealth and corruption, impoverishment and armed conflict—a global symbol of squandered possibility. “Wherever there is oil, especially in developing countries, by and large there is a lot of pilfering, and society doesn’t really enjoy the profits,” Burtynsky had told me. “In the Niger Delta, the pushback from the have-nots has been to go in there and start pirating the oil.” In recent years, parts of the delta have taken on the atmosphere of a war zone: hidden among mangroves and low bush, villagers and local militias have established countless makeshift distilleries to refine crude stolen from pipelines, while dumping tons of oleaginous waste back into the ground. The government has estimated that two hundred and fifty thousand barrels are stolen daily, but nobody really knows. Last year, Nigeria’s newly elected President, Muhammadu Buhari, vowed to end the theft, noting, “The amount involved is mind-boggling.”
....
Burtynsky seeks moments when the view of a landscape falls into order: “You try to let the subject tell you where it is.”
“OIL BUNKERING #2, NIGER DELTA, NIGERIA 2016” / PHOTOGRAPH BY EDWARD BURTYNSKY
....
PHOTOGRAPHS © EDWARD BURTYNSKY, COURTESY NICHOLAS METIVIER GALLERY, TORONTO / HOWARD GREENBERG GALLERY AND BRYCE WOLKOWITZ GALLERY, NEW YORK
Raffi Khatchadourian became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 2008.
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