Tailings Pond #2, Wesselton Diamond Mine, Kimberley, Northern Cape, South Africa, 2018

Aside from its resemblance to a flower, nothing else about this image suggests that it is a photograph of an actual place. Together, the mineral colours and the irregular shapes of the tailings patterns give the illusion of volumetric texture—you might even say they throb, but these are planes, not volumes. After evaporation, the scene will be mostly monochromatic. Burtynsky’s lens reverses the optics between the elevated road and the level pond. The result is a thoroughly abstract picture that distances itself from representation, despite high fidelity and extreme detail.

In the past, Burtynsky used composition to effect defamiliarization. He exploits his subject’s native strangeness to slow the viewer’s assimilation of it. By shooting from above, and eliminating the horizon, he prevents the viewer from easily recognizing the picture as a landscape. Yet, it is as accurate a recording of a landscape as the medium allows. He explored the paradox again in later images, such as Coal Tailing #1, Ravensworth Mine, Hunter Valley, New South Wales, Australia, 2022, another elegant composition with a schematic resemblance to flowers, also in grey-scale. The Australian mining landscape, however, is the opposite of flat and just as ambiguous as the flatness of the South African view.

Unlike cultural artifacts, industries and industrial procedures only have economics to protect them. A respect for history and heritage behooves us to maintain at least a visual record of industry. This is where Burtynsky re-joins the grand narrative arc specific to a medium we use to record the passage of time: whatever else they may be, his photographs are a core sample of the constantly receding industrial past seen from its present.