Flying High: Edward Burtynsky’s Photographs - Review by Donald Kuspit

Çayırhan Coal Mine Tailings #1, Nallıhan District, Ankara Province, Central Anatolia, Türkiye, 2022, Pigment inkjet print, 52 x 39 inches. © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

By DONALD KUSPIT July 16, 2025

            We’re high above the Salt River Pima and Maricopa Indian Community, a suburb of Scottsdale, Arizona in the USA, 2011, the master Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky tells us, looking down at what seem to be fields of green—flourishing nature, arranged in intricate geometrical patterns—twinned with what seem to be a desiccated version of the same field, no longer enjoyably scenic, delightfully picturesque.  Chino Mine #3, Silver City, New Mexico, USA, 2012 makes the destructive point more decisively, relentlessly:  there is no longer any sign of flourishing nature, but only an image of exploited—utterly ruined—nature:   what were once fields have been stripped of life.  Burtynsky’s photographs of nature exploited and ruined, of what he ironically calls “manufactured landscapes”—emblematic of the “death of nature,” more pointedly the murder of Mother Nature, as the feminist Carolyn Merchant argues in her account of the shift in understanding of nature as the sacred source of all life to anonymous raw material, technologically exploitable unto death—are ironically sublime.  The sublimity of Burtynsky’s images—to use Kant’s term, they are mathematically sublime, as the vastness of the space they convey indicates—contrasts with their devastating content, as Mines #13, Inco—Abandoned Mine Shaft, Crean Hill Mine, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, 1984 and, Nickel Tailings #34 Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, 1996 make clear.  Burtynsky’s junkheap of discarded Telephones, #21, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, 1997—it forms a mountain almost occupying the entire pictorial space, suggesting the oddly surreal character of many of Burtynsky’s photographs.  Burtynsky has made more obviously documentary photographs, many with his usual bird’s eye view—Highway #5, Los Angeles, California, USA, 2009 and Modjo-Hawassa Expressway #1, Alem Tena, Ethiopia, 2018—and others down to earth and straightforward, deliberately grounded in factories, where raw natural materials are used to manufacture refined social products, among them Manufacturing #7, Textile Mill, Xiaoxing, Zhejiang Province, China, 2004 and Silver Spark Apparel #1, Hawassa Industrial Park, Awassa, Ethiopia, 2018.  Perhaps the most surprising but telling photograph in the exhibition is China Recycling #22, Portrait of a Woman in Blue Zeguo, Zhejiang Province, China, 2004.  Passively posing for the photographer, implicitly a symbol of the watchdog state, alongside waste matter in what seems to be a garbage room, she is the picture of obedient servitude, waiting to be discarded when she is too old to be of use.  In a sense, Burtynsky’s portrait of her is the most socially critical of his photographs, for she is the human dregs of the Great (Industrial) Society, no longer able to function as a cog in a machine, like the young man in the Hawassa Industrial Park. 

Rainforest #3, Olympic National Park,  Washington, USA, 2024 Pigment inkjet print, 48 x 64 inches. © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Coast Mountains #20, Monarch Ice Cap, British Columbia, Canada, 2023 Pigment inkjet print, 48 x 64 inches. © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

       One only has to compare Burtynsky’s ironical Natural Order #33, Grey County, Ontario, Canada, 2020 to Ansel Adams’ worshipful The Tetons and the Snake River, 1942 to see how much nature has become one-dimensional and oddly sick, as the thicket of thin, emaciated trees suggests.  And how much the landscape has become “manufactured,” as he called the sixty large scale images, some 48 by 60 inches, competing with the size of human beings, and as such intimidating, not to say confrontational.  Is he also suggesting that human beings have become manufactured, not to say robotic accessories to machines, like the figure in the Hawassa Industrial Park?   Where Henri Cartier-Bresson said he took a photograph at the “decisive moment,” Burtynsky says he takes a photograph at the “contemplative moment,” implying that the most meaningful photographs are not “incidental,” as Cartier-Bresson’s tend to be, but, like Burtynsky’s photographs, are informed by “prolonged thought,” rather than “immediate response.”  They are  “conceptual” not simplistically “perceptual.”  Burtynsky is “tracking” a socio-historical as well as art historical development:  the change from the static image to the moving image, that is, from the intransitive image to the transitive image—from regarding nature as a finished product rather than realizing it is in perpetual metamorphic process—what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called “creative process.” 

Tailings Pond #1, Kamoa Kakula, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2024 Pigment inkjet print, 39 x 52 inches. © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Dry Tailings #1, Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2024 Pigment inkjet print, 48 x 96 inches. © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

What is striking about Burtynsky’s photographs is that they read as scenes in endless creative process—condensed films, as it were—rather than finished, fetishized images, as Cartier-Bresson’s seem to be.  There is no decisive—fetishized—moment, but a devolutionary process, ongoing as Burtynsky implies.  Change, for the worse, seems inescapable in technological society, destructive of nature, and of the human beings who make it work.  The instrumentalization of human beings is an implicit subtheme of Burtynsky’s photographs.  They are critically realistic damnations of technological society in eloquent aesthetic disguise, making it emotionally palatable to those who fear it, above all Burtynsky, who seems to identify with the one seriously human being in his photographs, the old woman in Blue Zeguo, obedient to the end to the System, so compliant to it that she feels no bitterness about her fate, passively accepting it. WM

Edward Burtynsky: Natural Commodities | August 6 -- September 20, 2025 at Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Edward Burtynsky: The Great Acceleration | Jun 19, 2025 - Sep 28, 2025 at the International Center of Photography, New York