Chapter

Pivot Irrigation #7, High Plains, Texas Panhandle, USA, 2011

While developing his Water project, Burtynsky photographed numerous examples of centre-point irrigation. Some of the images from this series show verdant crops, but others—such as Pivot Irrigation #7, High Plains, Texas Panhandle, USA—were captured while the fields lay fallow and subject to wind-erosion. The mural-sized print marks an important development in Burtynsky’s compositional practice: a closer alignment with abstract art. Shot from directly above—a novel vantage point for the artist at the time—it demonstrates the capabilities of drone photography.

The Texas Panhandle, which serves as the setting for Pivot Irrigation #7, is part of a climatically unreliable region of the great prairie east of the Rocky Mountains and west of the Mississippi River. In fact, the land in this area—from Nebraska down to the Texas Panhandle, via Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado—turned into a vast desert during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Beneath it lies the Ogallala Aquifer, an immense subterranean reservoir stretching across eight states, anywhere from 30 to 700 feet below the surface. A buried sea of freshwater, it has irrigated the sunlit farmland above since the 1950s. Pumped up from a central hub, the water is distributed along a perforated pipe that rotates its great length like a compass, creating the hundreds of perfect circles visible when flying over the region.

As you approach the monumental Pivot Irrigation #7, tiny farm buildings reveal themselves, along with a grid of roads that frame the square agricultural plots in which the circles are inscribed. Monochromatic compared to the concentric and colourful Art Deco era paintings of Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) that the work dourly evokes, the photograph nonetheless shares with early modernist abstraction a visual delight in formal pattern. It recalls the Target paintings of Jasper Johns (b.1930), the many concentric compositions of the Op art era, such as the “gongs” by Claude Tousignant (1932–2005), or the tantric mandalas of the Nepali Buddhist tradition. Art history is not short of circles.

By adopting drone photography to shoot this and other works for the Water project, Burtynsky created new ways to engage with industrial geometries and environmental intervention, while dramatically reducing his carbon footprint. The picture both obscures and expresses the stress placed on the unseen aquifer by such a water-intensive form of agriculture. In some regions, particularly in the American Southwest, parts of the Ogallala Aquifer have dried up entirely from overuse, rendering irrigation no longer viable. The geometry may be functional and even beautiful from the air, but the technique is unsustainable: the aquifer is depleting, and full replenishment could take centuries, if it is possible at all, given the arid and semi-arid climate above ground where precipitation is scarce.