{"id":7069,"date":"2011-09-27T12:18:22","date_gmt":"2011-09-27T12:18:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=7069"},"modified":"2025-11-14T22:04:55","modified_gmt":"2025-11-15T05:04:55","slug":"edward-burtynsky-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/edward-burtynsky-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Edward Burtynsky Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"
Edward Burtynsky’s The Industrial Sublime<\/em>, now up at Weber State University’s Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery <\/a>through November 22nd, was reviewed in the September 2011 edition of 15 Bytes. Earlier this month Burtynsky came to Weber State University, and before giving his artistic talk Hikmet Sidney Loe sat down to talk to him about his work.<\/address>\n

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Edward Burtynsky Interview: September 16, 2011
\nHikmet Sidney Loe<\/p>\n

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Hikmet Sidney Loe (HSL):<\/strong> I wanted to follow up on the three wishes you posited during your 2005 TED Prize acceptance speech. Did any of the wishes come true? One wish was for an IMAX movie; did you get to make one?<\/p>\n

Edward Burtynsky (EB): <\/strong>No, I didn\u2019t end up making the IMAX movie, but I did end up making the film Manufactured Landscapes<\/em> with Jennifer Baichwal. In an interesting way it had a broader audience than I think even an IMAX movie would have had, but it wasn\u2019t ultimate in working in the large format of film. I delved into making an IMAX film and spent a year, and a lot of people came up to help, but it\u2019s a tough thing to make happen. It\u2019s a big camera\u2026I was trying to mount it on the nose of a helicopter in very remote industrial spaces. We were looking at a budget of over $7 million dollars, there was no guarantee of distribution, and every IMAX theatre had their own choice of relationships cultivated with major institutions, so I just looked at the whole thing and thought, no. That being said, I was just approached by some people making IMAX films but that\u2019s easier said than done.<\/p>\n

HSL: <\/strong>How was the content of the Weber State University show [Edward Burtynsky: The Industrial Sublime<\/em>] chosen, did you have a hand in that?<\/p>\n

EB:<\/strong> No, I have someone in my studio who works with me, Marcus, who works with media and museums. I\u2019ve known Marcus for 35 years\u2026he\u2019s worked with me for 8 years\u2026we went to school together. He\u2019s like an extension of me. That allows me to concentrate on: what am I doing next, where am I going next, what am I shooting next. So, I\u2019m always in that front end of development. Working with all those things is almost a full time job; I didn\u2019t want to have that distraction while I try to make new work.<\/p>\n

HSL:<\/strong> What\u2019s next? What are you working on that\u2019s coming up?<\/p>\n

EB: <\/strong>I did the Oil<\/em> show and it\u2019s still circulating through the United States, Canada, and Europe. I\u2019m thinking that \u201cwater\u201d is another subject that I felt how we as humans shape landscape in pursuit of water. So, that\u2019s something I\u2019ve been working on for three years. I\u2019ve just had some images published in National Geographic<\/em> (\u201cPlumbing California\u201d 2010). I started researching it in 2008, shot in 2009, and published in 2010. I was already moving in that direction when I received the call from National Geographic<\/em>, so I said sure.<\/p>\n

HSL: <\/strong>How many people do you usually work with?<\/p>\n

EB:<\/strong> Minimum I can be down to two, then go all the way up to seven or eight. When the film was following me around, there were 15 people around.<\/p>\n

HSL:<\/strong> Is there a body of work you would like to revisit? Or do you feel that the work you\u2019ve done is in the past?<\/p>\n

EB:<\/strong> I have an idea of doing something with mining again that I haven\u2019t done. I\u2019m finished with quarries, but there\u2019s something with mining that I\u2019m still working through. I don\u2019t feel like I\u2019ve had the last image on that one yet. I\u2019m doing a project on agriculture. I worked early on in my career, 1981, 1982 I was doing a whole series on \u201cAnimal Husbandry.\u201d Photographing industrial chicken, pork farms, cattle\u2026I\u2019ve touched on it, did a bit of work on it, but never brought it to any kind of completion. That\u2019s a subject I find\u2026but it\u2019s a very sensitive one, I\u2019m not sure what my chances are of getting that one done.<\/p>\n

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HSL: Have you been back to Bingham Copper Pit to photograph it?<\/p>\n

EB:<\/strong> I have been back to Bingham and photographed it from a helicopter, but it was a bloody cold day and my whole camera seized up. It was so cold it was like 20 below Celsius [-4 F]. I think I ended up squeezing off about fifteen shots then it died. I had all the expense of getting a chopper above it then turned around to go back and just thaw!<\/p>\n

HSL:<\/strong> Is there a site you would like to revisit?<\/p>\n

EB:<\/strong> There are places I haven\u2019t gotten to the extent I\u2019d like to; as I said, in the world of mining, there are a couple things I\u2019d like to revisit. I think it would be interesting to revisit Bingham, it was one of my first successful mining pictures.<\/p>\n

HSL:<\/strong> Which body of work was the most physically challenging to work on?<\/p>\n

EB:<\/strong> Well Bangladesh, and the ship breaking work was ridiculously challenging. The air was really bad; half way through the shoot I got sick; I usually don\u2019t get sick on my shoots. I was down for three days flat on my back during a very important shoot. It was very stressful, and dirty, and hot, and like going back to [Charles] Dickens looking at and the satanic mills or something.<\/p>\n

HSL:<\/strong> You have mentioned Caspar David Friedrich as an artist whose work inspired you. Are there other artists in the same vein of the sublime who have inspired you?<\/p>\n

EB: <\/strong>Sure. The landscape photographer Carleton Watkins is one. I saw a show of his with the 18×22 \u201cMammoth Plate\u201d images of the American West. His inspiration [to me] was not only the incredible craftsmanship at the time, but the absolute insanity of the difficulty of what he was trying to do. Understanding what these photographers were doing in coating their glass plates in the field and building the roads to actually get there. Whenever I complain about lugging an 8×10 I have to remind myself \u201cthis is nothing.\u201d I carry coated sheet film in my backpack, by myself, and it just kind of gave me a lesson in, \u201cdon\u2019t be a wuss!\u201d Some of those early guys, such as Samuel Bourne, were just incredible. He did work in India that was just awesome; he did crazy stuff with glaciers. So, what the nineteenth century pioneers did was something very direct, honest, observational work. It wasn\u2019t full of mannerisms, it wasn\u2019t trying to be anything it was just responding to that thing in front of the camera, in what I felt to be a very honest and profound way. Friedrich, the painter, was also that kind of [artist], particularly in those ice field pictures, the ships were blocked in ice. Us dwarfed by the forces of nature, to me, that was the scale he played with. The notion that nature is a dominant force was an interesting, romantic point of view at that time.<\/p>\n

HSL:<\/strong> Do you consider your work to be related to the New Topographics photography movement, or to the work of photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, or Andreas Gursky?<\/p>\n

EB: <\/strong>When I was going through school in 1976, there was a show of the New Topographics that we were made aware of. I saw the book at that time [William Jenkins, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape<\/em>. Rochester, NY: International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, 1975], we discussed the work at school. I found it really interesting\u2026I was always interested in the landscape. As a kid growing up, and being in Canada, as you know, there\u2019s a pretty small population with a mighty big chunk of land, so I got into the experience. That experience of what I call the pristine, or raw landscape, the one we haven\u2019t really gone in or intervened in, or stomped all over, it\u2019s interesting because I recognize not all people have had the experience to be out there in that space, or to fully understand what it is that nature delivers without our intervention. It\u2019s like, what is this planet when we don\u2019t mess with it? What does its surface look like? To me it\u2019s a really important reference point\u2026I\u2019m not sure I could have made all this work without understanding that reference point of what it is before we intervene.<\/p>\n

HSL: <\/strong>In Manufactured Landscapes<\/em>, your work exposes the viewer to industrialization through interior workspaces that are as vast as landscapes, and exterior landscapes that have been reworked for manufacturing. Do you think we live in an era where people aren\u2019t aware of the difference between interior and exterior spaces? Are people losing the idea that nature is available for something other than extraction industries?<\/p>\n

EB:<\/strong> Oh, people don\u2019t even think about the \u201cother landscape\u201d maybe we\u2019ve become so urban that nature is kind of a sideshow, a little thing out there, it isn\u2019t relevant to survival in the urban jungle. Some people go out there to hike in nature, to enjoy that experience of being in the fresh air and exercise, but I don\u2019t think a lot of people think about that place as necessary for our survival. Or, they don\u2019t think that diminishing that world creates an unbalance that may come back and affect our more synthetic world. But it does. If we do something that kills all the frogs off, or kills off whatever, if we think that won\u2019t work up the food chain and compromise the health of the general environment, we\u2019re just really in denial of what nature is and how it\u2019s all interconnected. If we remove a component, if one component is taken out, it doesn\u2019t stop there.<\/p>\n

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Edward Burtynsky speaks at Weber State University, photo by Jared Christensen<\/p><\/div>\n

HSL:<\/strong> Because of the nature of your photographs, and the knowledge you have of the environment, is there a way that you don\u2019t feel defeated by that knowledge?<\/p>\n

EB:<\/strong> It seems from doing all the work I\u2019ve done\u2026there are many people who are out there trying to ring the alarm bells to bring awareness to the fact that we\u2019re clearly outside of a sustainable envelope; it\u2019s not something we can do indefinitely. There will be a day of reckoning. Should we be at all concerned about postponing that day of reckoning, or, try to avoid that day of reckoning? Currently I don\u2019t see very much effort in either of those two camps. In fact, lately it\u2019s been very disheartening to hear: \u201cLet\u2019s get rid of the EPA!\u201d What?? \u201cThat\u2019s a frill.\u201d That\u2019s not a frill!! It\u2019s clear that voice is being pushed back [Al Gore on climate change]. It\u2019s not unusual that in a period of economic contraction the environment is sidelined because everybody is more worried about jobs, and more worried about families and losing their homes. Clearly, you can\u2019t really argue too much about that, when people are suffering at that level. It\u2019s understandable. But it still doesn\u2019t justify rolling back. If one looks back at the intentions the EPA put forward: all the citizenry of the country are entitled to clean air, clean water, and food that they can eat, why would that change? Why does the right think it\u2019s not good for them to have clean water, clean air, and good food? They die the same way we do, so I don\u2019t get it! Unless their belief system is in denial. Cognitive dissonance.<\/p>\n

HSL:<\/strong> Do you still find aesthetic beauty in landscapes, or does the knowledge of extraction \u2013 all of these systems we have overlaid onto the landscape \u2013 taint its beauty for you?<\/p>\n

EB:<\/strong> I think I\u2019m more largely looking at\u2026when I make the image of these places, what I\u2019m really trying to do is to make an image that has a better chance of making you look at it, than to avert your eyes from it. I tend to steer away from calling it \u201cbeauty\u201d or \u201caesthetics\u201d and move more towards what makes an image visually compelling. Can that image evoke a sense of wonder, or a sense of displacement, or \u201cwhere am I?\u201d You know, the kind of surreal aspects of perception. I think all those things I\u2019ve always been interested in: what people want to look at, what brings people to want to look at an image. In the 20th<\/sup> century, a lot of that interest in making an image that is easier to look at, pleasing to look at, calming to look at…by getting rid of that aesthetic overlay into that image, to me, was to some extent throwing out the baby with the bathwater. That is one of the most powerful things that the visual language is capable of doing, the visual medium is capable of doing. And yet, in the arts I think in the 20th<\/sup> century it was largely a reaction against the bourgeois creating objects for their consumption. A lot of artists blamed the war, the politicians, and the elites, it drove them into these horrific places; there was a reaction against the elite. Art moved away from the aesthetic and moved into other forms of expression that was less about creating objects for the marketplace and more about ideas and pushing different levels of human experience and understanding human experience. Abstraction, all kinds of other things came forward. But, photography is, by its nature, a kind of a dance with subject matter. You\u2019re always having subject matter: it\u2019s an optic that renders reality. No matter where you put the camera, you\u2019re pointing it at a subject. It is what I call the uber-representational tool. So, I just decided to take it as a representational tool as far as I could take it, and to make images to resolve the real world in a way that we could never experience it, even in the presence of the place itself. It does something: I find that picture far more interesting than being there. We don\u2019t experience the world that way. It\u2019s usual that these places are boring, mundane places, and I spend a lot of time trying to not make it a boring, mundane place. I find by moving and hunting, roving my eye\u2026it\u2019s almost like composing a picture. It\u2019s like breaking into a safe, but you don\u2019t know the numbers. So you have to very subtly feel the tumblers drop, until the light\u2019s right, the point of view\u2019s right, the space\u2026all these little things have to drop into place. And when all of them are in place, and you\u2019ve hit all the numbers, it opens up\u2026it comes through. It\u2019s very much like you\u2019re constructing it\u2026<\/p>\n

HSL:<\/strong> Can you give us an example?<\/p>\n

EB:<\/strong> So, the Breezewood photograph [Breezewood, Pennsylvania, USA 2008<\/em>], by the time I figured out that photograph, it took me over two days. With the point of, I tried to photograph it every which way to Sunday. I rented a 4WD, I rented a 40-foot scissor lift, I was driving all over the place. Ultimately, I had to find a place where I could park that thing and have 40 feet of height, was the range of possibilities I had to photograph. I spent two days driving up and down, trying different places, going over here, going over there. Finally, after about a whole day of looking, I finally choose my spot. I then recognized the time of day it would be best to shoot it. I went back to set up and just sat in that one place and waited for two hours to watch the light. I chose one picture from that. So, that\u2019s three days to make one picture. I did another picture of the Sturgess motorcycle rally [Downtown Sturgis, South Dakota. USA, 2008<\/em>]\u2026that took me three years to figure out how to make that picture! It took me three years of negotiating to make a picture like that. These aren\u2019t chance happenings, they\u2019re very\u2026to me the hardest thing is to decide: what is the picture? That\u2019s the heavy-duty work; that\u2019s the hardest choice. Of all the things I could photograph in the world, what do I choose to photograph? The tyranny of choice!<\/p>\n

HSL:<\/strong> In Manufactured Landscapes<\/em>, you say you had an \u201coil epiphany\u201d while driving in 1997: the fuel and car\u2019s components were based upon the oil industry. You called \u201coil\u201d the key building block of the past century. What do you envision is the key building block of the century we inhabit? Is that water? Or are we still on oil, will it always be oil?<\/p>\n

EB:<\/strong> No, it can\u2019t always be oil, because we\u2019ll run out of it! Water is a necessity of life, so if we run out of it, we\u2019re really skunked. The thing about oil for those who have been looking at things long enough: peak oil is not a question of if [we run out] it\u2019s a question of when. Although, I think people don\u2019t want to really think about that. If the question is when, then are we in it? Is it going to happen in five years, are we in it? Is it going to happen in ten years? There are different peak oils; there\u2019s peak oil at $100\/barrel, there\u2019s peak oil at $200\/barrel\u2026some people refer to the price of oil as playing ping-pong on a moving train; the thing\u2019s going back and forth but the price is going up. And that\u2019s eventually what\u2019s going to happen to oil \u2013 it is! – it\u2019s going up and up. When the energy it takes to get the oil out is equal to the energy you put in, you\u2019re done: you\u2019re taking more oil out to feed the machine to take the oil out, so nobody gets any oil. Then, I believe there are seven billion of us here because of oil. To me it\u2019s become very clear that this was at the core of everything, and there isn\u2019t an easy replacement. Let\u2019s say we can find an alternative to oil energy: let\u2019s say it\u2019s sun\u2026batteries. There is a whole bunch of other things that oil\u2026molecular strings of oil is doing, from plastics, to oils, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, paints, it\u2019s everything. You start looking at how it\u2019s used in all the other industries. Or, when we\u2019re driving, we\u2019re driving on black top\u2026we\u2019re driving on oil! We\u2019re using oil to drive on oil, so my epiphany was: it\u2019s everywhere, and once oil starts to dial back, are we prepared? I don\u2019t think we\u2019re prepared at all! I believe there are technological answers that are pretty significant, so that possibly we\u2019ll be able to build all this stuff out of nanotechnology so that it can be structured to whatever we want. I don\u2019t think we\u2019re that far from doing that. There are alternative energies that are on the cusp of breaking through and becoming viable, but nothing\u2019s as easy and cheap as pumping it out of the ground. As long as it\u2019s easy and cheap, we\u2019re not going to re-invest in the next generation of stuff\u2026until it\u2019s no longer easy and cheap.<\/p>\n

Postscript:<\/strong> Burtynsky\u2019s public talk in the Department of Visual Arts (Weber State University) followed this interview. He spoke for over an hour, presenting many photographs not included in the current exhibition \u201cThe Industrial Sublime.\u201d Highlights included early photographs of pristine landscapes and several images from the \u201cRail Cut\u201d series (landscapes horizontally divided by railroad lines; the upper landscape was untouched by human intervention when the lower landscape under the railroad line was disrupted). Burtynsky also showed new work from his next series, \u201cWater\u201d in his continuing, investigation into how we have transformed our planet through infrastructure and industrial redirection. Images span the globe, from Owens Lake and the Salton Sea in California (showing their dearth of water), to the Gulf of Mexico during the BP oil spill of 2010, to 12th<\/sup> century water wells in India, and contemporary farms lands in Spain. Watch for an upcoming book on the “Water” series, and Burtynsky’s next film.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Edward Burtynsky’s The Industrial Sublime, now up at Weber State University’s Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery through November 22nd, was reviewed in the September 2011 edition of 15 Bytes. Earlier this month Burtynsky came to Weber State University, and before giving his artistic talk Hikmet Sidney Loe sat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7070,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[463],"class_list":["post-7069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-5","tag-edward-burtynsky"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/Burtynsky-2.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-23 09:26:26","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7069"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7069\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98825,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7069\/revisions\/98825"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}