![]() ![]() I'm trying to show us 'these are all actual parts of our world that are unfolding every day in order to support what is now 8bn people, wanting to have more and more of what we in the West have'. I think all my work, in a way, is showing us at work in 'business as usual' mode. 'Activist' seems to lean more into the direct political discourse – I don't want to turn my work into an indictment, a two-dimensional kind of blunt tool to say, 'this is wrong, this is bad, cease and desist'. GV: Do you see yourself as holding up a mirror to the world as it changes, and as it becomes more human-dominated? Or do you see yourself as an activist – are you trying to prompt change?ĮB: Well, I wouldn't say activist – somebody once mentioned 'artivist' and I liked that better. And they're training these young 16, 17-year-olds, taking them away from their families and then putting them right into the sewing machine sweatshop. So instead the Chinese are training textile workers – mainly female – in Ethiopia, and Senegal, and within two or three months, those girls are behind sewing machines and on par with Chinese production rates and what they would’ve expected out of a Chinese factory. The labour force has said: 'I'm not going to work for cheap wages like this anymore.' And it has to leave China because they're gagging on the pollution. We're meeting the end of globalisation and where you can go. There isn't another place.ĮB: I often say that 'this is the end of the road'. But where is it going to be offshored next? We can't just keep offshoring. GV: The industrial revolution started in England and the factories of the North, and still if we dig down, it's just completely polluted soils and landscapes, and then that was offshored to poorer countries and so on… That cycle is hitting Africa. Getting to it required that we carry all our heavy equipment while climbing jagged rocks for about 1.5km. One such location was Dallol, a volcanic hellscape of sulfurous springs. We spent three days there shooting in the mornings we would get up and then drive as far as 25km to get to our locations. And we were sleeping outside because there are no buildings, there are no interior spaces. At night, it was 40C – even 40 is almost unbearable. I've never worked in temperatures over 50C. It's known as one of the hottest places in the world and has been referred to as 'hell on Earth'. The Danakil Depression is a vast area covering about 200km by 50km. We had to turn off our GPS because we couldn't get it to calibrate, it didn't know where it was. So the drone GPS was saying: 'You're not supposed to be here. GV: I noticed that you went to the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia – tell me about that.ĮB: All our drone equipment wasn't working because we were 400 feet below sea level. I started in Kenya, and then Ethiopia, then Nigeria, and then I went to South Africa. Overall it's been a decade-long project, researching and then photographing in 10 countries. Can you tell me about African Studies?Įdward Burtynsky: I was reading that China was beginning to offshore to Africa, and I thought that would be really interesting to follow. We see the results of that far, far away in a natural landscape made unnatural by our activities. Gaia Vince: With your pictures we see the results of our consumption habits or our lifestyles, in our cities. The writer Gaia Vince, whose book Nomad Century was published in 2022, interviewed Burtynsky for BBC Culture about his latest project, African Studies.Īfrican Studies is now collected in a book and is on display at Flowers Gallery, Hong Kong until. ![]() For more than 40 years, the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has recorded the impact of humans on the Earth in large-scale images that often resemble abstract paintings.
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