Nickel Tailings #34 & #35, Sudbury, Ontario (diptych), 1996

Nickel Tailings #34 & #35, Sudbury, Ontario, is perhaps the most iconic pair of images in Burtynsky’s oeuvre. The diptych depicts oxidized runoff as brilliant red rivers that appear to flow symmetrically away from one another like stylized Rorschach test tributaries. In fact, the streams are less than a foot wide—but the illusion, carefully composed and shot from above, produces a grand theatrical effect. The images are standouts from Burtynsky’s series Tailings, which was shot primarily in Northern Ontario. After appearing in a 1996 issue of Canadian Art, they quickly became among the most widely reproduced works in his early career—and they remain emblematic.

In the mid-1990s, the artist was not yet working digitally. He shot the Tailings series on Kodacolor film and printed the images on Kodacolor paper to amplify the saturated reds, a chromatic strength of these materials. The surrounding ground is almost black (it had just rained), further intensifying contrast.

The mineral-rich Sudbury basin was formed by an ancient meteorite; the heavily mined region had long boasted of being the “Nickel Capital of the World” until it was superseded by more recently discovered sites in Indonesia. Sudbury was once surrounded by dead zones where acid rain had stripped the soil of life, as recorded in this series. In the far distance of the diptych, we see faint signs of recovery: scrubby saplings of quaking aspen and paper birch, pioneer species that are first to reappear after boreal forest fires. Their remote presence prefigures the slow ecological rebound that the region has known since.

Landscape has been a foundational genre in Canada’s settler art, reflecting the country’s vast and varied terrain. The tradition stretches from the schematic maps and drawings of such seventeenth-century figures as Samuel de Champlain (1567–1635) and the contemporaneous Jesuit Relations annual reports, to the military watercolours of eighteenth-century British officers such as Thomas Davies (1737–1812). By the nineteenth century, interest in topography continued in work by painter Joseph Légaré (1795–1855), and later by the more ethnographically inclined German-born Cornelius Krieghoff (1815–1872). They were joined by photographers, none more systematic in his documentation than the Scottish-born entrepreneur William Notman (1826–1891).

Burtynsky enters this long tradition at a moment of rupture. He shifts the landscape idiom away from colonial surveying and picturesque observation toward something darker, more disquieting: the post-industrial sublime of a compromised habitat. His Sudbury tailings images are pivotal in that transition, dramatizing environmental degradation while emphasizing an abstract formal elegance.

There are no human figures to help establish scale, but this absence serves a purpose. A figure might anchor the scene too securely in reportage, domesticating its strangeness and dulling its charge. The stark contrast of red against black, replacing the greens and blues that we conventionally associate with landscape, heightens the drama and estranges the viewer. In this, the image doesn’t just document an ecological sore; it redefines the terms of Canadian landscape art for a new century.