Edward Burtynsky is considered among of the most important contemporary photographers for his unique ability to confuse environmental destruction with high art. Rooted in the art historical tradition of Romanticism and the sublime, his work documents how human industrial systems have reshaped the planet. His large-scale, visually stunning photographs are renowned for capturing beauty in destruction. They ask viewers to confront the environmental cost of modern life, or repulsion through the lens of seduction.
SUBJECT & THEME
Edward Burtynsky, Coast Mountains #19, British Columbia, Canada, 2023.
Edward Burtynsky is a landscape artist, but his subject breaks down into two entangled aspects: the industrial and the natural. Typically, industry is the more explicit, while nature is implied. The emphasis is reversed in some works, however, such as Coast Mountains #19, British Columbia, Canada, 2023, which pictures mountains formerly hidden behind glaciers and snow. In this case, industrial development and overpopulation—key causes of the new climate now melting snow caps—are the stealth subject partners of pictures that, superficially, appear to take nature as their exclusive subject.
Aficionados of Burtynsky’s work will have noticed that its binary aspects cannot be pried apart. Although he is best known for pictures of industrial installations, such as Silver Lake Operations #1, Lake Lefroy, Western Australia, 2007, these are inconceivable without the presence of exploitable natural phenomena that explain the presence of mines, factories, infrastructure, or industrial farms. The circumstances and consequences of industry’s transformation of the land introduce other implied subjects—history, science, economics, politics, capitalism, and culture. Rich in practical information about nature and industry, Burtynsky’s photographs also expose human nature—our needs and psychology—observed through the filter of industrial exploitation.
Attraction/repulsion, Burtynsky’s signature effect, is facilitated by the twin vulnerabilities the work exploits: our susceptibility to beauty and our lust for control‑over nature, over ideas, and over each other. These characteristics have enabled our proliferation, but the sum of Burtynsky’s work seems to suggest that, at this point, they might just as likely be our undoing.
Edward Burtynsky, Silver Lake Operations #1, Lake Lefroy, Western Australia, 2007.
Art is a far older enterprise than industry, and a culturally universal human activity. Every society produces art because we want more beauty and because we want to make sense of the world. The same impulse to understand and control has enabled human survival, but it has also produced systems of extraction and unsustainable growth. In this context, art can sharpen these conditions by making them visible—and beautiful. Burtynsky’s works do just that: they better acquaint the viewer with our collective circumstance. Images such as Oil Fields #2, Belridge, California, USA, 2003, draw the viewer in with their form and aesthetics before we are confronted by the scale and massive consequences of the industrial operations reflected within them.
Nature is the fundamental fact of life; we are unthinkable without it because we are one of its creatures. The purpose of industry is to gather natural resources and transform them in the service of human flourishing—the harvesting of food, the extraction of minerals, the pumping of water and fuel, the manufacturing of goods, etc. Even in pictures that show no trace of nature, such as close-ups of machines or recycling artifacts (for instance, Ferrous Bushling #18, Hamilton, Ontario, 1997), the photograph itself is an instance of nature transformed by industry. The constant in Burtynsky’s photographs is nature, industry is the variable.
Edward Burtynsky, Oil Fields #2 , Belridge, California, USA, 2003.
Edward Burtynsky, Ferrous Bushling #18, Hamilton, Ontario, 1997.
Edward Burtynsky, Oil Fields #19ab, Belridge, California, USA, 2003.
The tension between prolific nature and pragmatic industry is the artist’s signature theme, expressed by human activity on the land. These are Burtynsky’s equal protagonists. Although his images might superficially emphasize one over the other, the point of his work is the ubiquity of an increasingly worrying dichotomy. His success as a maker of pictures relies on the emotional effect of this juxtaposition, as well as on his thematically resonant virtuosity as a technician. His materials and equipment are instances of his subject.
Burtynsky is not a passive recorder: his is an authorial art in the guise of neutral reportage. To make his point, it is important that both nature and industry be seductively represented. The scale and technological implications of his pictures of industry overwhelm us in person, as if the artist were attempting to replicate the sensation of that first visit to his father’s workplace.
Considerable rigour is required to make a lifetime of pictures that exemplify youthful enthusiasm for industry, while slowly qualifying them with the apperception of maturity and loss. Burtynsky’s career trajectory charts this gradual shift as ambivalence seeps into his practice without disturbing his convincing premise: industry is beautiful. Put another way, he has remained loyal to the exhilaration of the child, without resisting the anxiety of the adult. As aestheticized evidence of the human presence, his pictures are comforting and unsettling at once, a tension as unresolvable as the realization that progress may well prove self-defeating, an eternal parade of solutions that cause new problems.
Installation view of Burtynsky: Extraction/Abstraction at Saatchi Gallery, London, 2024.
THE SUBLIME LANDSCAPE
In the early 1980s, after his graduation from Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Toronto Metropolitan University), Burtynsky took a trip to New York where he saw photographs of the Yosemite Valley by Carleton Watkins (1829–1916) on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The carefully executed compositions of pristine wilderness landscape affected the young artist, who has since stated that they represented “a very honest attempt to tell the narrative of the thing in front of you through one frame, in as eloquent a way as possible.” With their large scale, formal clarity, and attention to composition, Burtynsky’s works are in the lineage of landscape photographers such as Watkins, Timothy O’Sullivan (c.1840–1882), Ansel Adams (1902–1984), and Minor White (1908–1976). But this is only part of the story. A persistent limitation of art historical critique is the focus on categorizing art by medium (such as painting or photography), which can obscure the broader connections and shared approaches that link different kinds of image-making across time.
Carleton Watkins, Distant View of the Domes, Yosemite Valley, California, 1861/71, albumen print, 51.9 x 40 cm, Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1809–10, oil on canvas, 110 cm × 171.5 cm, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
Caspar David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice, 1823-24, oil on canvas, 96.7 x 126.9 cm, Kunsthalle Hamburg.
Burtynsky’s work also enters into a longer dialogue with Romantic landscape painting, particularly in its concern with perception, scale, and the human relationship to nature. Romantic painters in the early nineteenth century saw nature as more than just scenery; they treated it as a way to reflect deeper ideas about human experience. For example, in Monk by the Sea, 1809–10, German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) visualizes an individual confronting infinite nature and, through it, the inward infinity of consciousness. Friedrich is an important reference for Burtynsky, who extends this approach, using contemporary landscapes to reflect humanity’s impact on the planet and the consequences of transforming the land. For Friederich, both the monk and the sea are secondary accessories to the representation of sight and psychology. Friedrich’s ultimate subject is perception. Burtynsky’s is hubris.
In another of Friedrich’s best-known works, The Sea of Ice, 1823–24, he affects something of the same sublimation that Burtynsky does in his photographs when either nature or industry is implied rather than featured. A majestic ice flow overwhelms a barely noticeable ship, a wrecked token of human achievement. That it was seen and painted by a feeling subject who is absent from the picture, qualifies and complicates the work’s ostensible message: the subordination of humanity to nature. But someone survived to witness and paint the scene, so all is not lost. Creating pictures on the other side of the Industrial Revolution, Burtynsky makes the same point in reverse by pairing nature with industry—a symbol of mankind, like Friedrich’s ship—and introducing ambiguity regarding which is the more awe-inspiring and which will be the other’s downfall. Unlike Friedrich, Burtynsky is no romantic. In his work, nature and industry are made equally sublime, but neither one is infinite. The sum of his work depicts humanity heedlessly expanding within a shrinking habitat.
Edward Burtynsky, Mines #15, Inco Tailings Pond, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, 1985.
While Burtynsky’s work fits comfortably into the history of landscape art, it also frequently quotes the works of mid-twentieth century painters. This dialogue with abstraction is not only formal but historical, situating his imagery within the postwar moment that reshaped both artistic practice and the planet itself. Environmentalists often locate the Anthropocene’s start date with the “Great Acceleration” around the year 1950, when population, industry, and consumerism began to boom in reaction to the cataclysm of the Second World War.
Edward Burtynsky, Pivot Irrigation #1, High Plains, Texas Panhandle, USA, 2011.
Burtynsky’s affinity for abstraction dates to his student years at Ryerson, when art historian Marta Braun introduced him to both mid-century high modernism and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. But abstraction in his work is not an end; it operates as a visual lure—a tactic of the sublime. If in Romantic paintings, the sublime was evoked through dramatic untamed landscapes—towering mountains, stormy seas, vast skies—in Burtynsky’s work, the same sense of awe emerges through abstraction: patterns, scale, and spatial ambiguity that heighten the aesthetic seduction of his images. His works ultimately question the industrial expansion that mid-century modernist art ignored.
By triangulating his juxtaposition—art, industry, and nature—Burtynsky implicates modern art, his other love, as an accessory to environmental dereliction. Let us not forget that art materials, especially those used by photographers and painters, are industrial products and many are toxic. This artist’s practice is anchored in paradox and ambivalence.
The difference between painting and photography cannot be exaggerated without obscuring the thematic continuity of art history. Burtynsky is best understood as an artist, rather than a photographer. This strategic positioning promotes the treatment of his subject as the more significant achievement over mastery of his medium. He follows both in the lineage of Friedrich and in the tradition of Watkins or Adams, commanding the emotional and philosophical charge of Romanticism and its evocation of the sublime as well as the technical and compositional mastery of the photographic medium. We should not let formalist typologies—or virtuosity, for that matter—blind us to thematic continuity across generations and media. Seen in this light, the same impulse to grapple with humanity’s place within vast, often overwhelming forces of change persists across Burtynsky’s practice as well as those of his predecessors, even as their subjects and conditions shift.
DOCUMENTARY SIGNIFICANCE & SOCIAL RELEVANCE
The aesthetic and sublime qualities of Burtynsky’s photographs have led to some critiques of his body of work. Gerda Cammaer, for instance, has argued that his images emphasize distance and decontextualization over “realism,” thereby divorcing them from being read as social commentary. But Burtynsky is not taking an explicitly moral stance in his works, so much as presenting the reality of our collective situation through an aesthetic frame, bringing broad attention to his urgent subject. It has been a winning strategy.
Edward Burtynsky working on site.
His ongoing commitment to documenting the present provides his work with a journalistic dimension. Approaching each project with the methods of a documentarian—researching, scouting, and then directing the shot on site—he gathers evidence of the unprecedented measure of industrial development, as well as the ever-expanding scale of human habitation. As Burtynsky himself has noted about the impact of his work that it makes visible the unimaginable:
We have all seen bits and pieces [of transformed landscapes], but rarely do we ever get behind the barbed fences and actually stand in front of them and bear witness to that transformation. That is the thing necessary to bring the landscape into our consciousness.
In this way, his images function not only as representations but as acts of exposure. He documents our transformative exploitation of the land and the environmental cost that Earth’s human fact has exacted. Works such as Manufacturing #17, Deda Chicken Processing Plant, 2005, exemplify this approach, combining forensic detail with sweeping scale to produce an image that can be read for its information and its aesthetics—in this case, a picture of China’s rapidly expanding manufacturing facilities. Each work is a historical record, brimming with visual data.
Edward Burtynsky, Manufacturing #17, Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Debui City, Jilin Province, China, 2005.
This dual function aligns Burtynsky with a longer documentary tradition in photography that understands the image as evidence. As photographer and theorist Allan Sekula has argued, documentary photographs circulate as carriers of social knowledge. Similarly, photo historian John Tagg has shown that documentary images are never neutral but are embedded in systems of power and meaning. Burtynsky participates in this tradition while complicating it: his photographs do not serve a single institutional purpose but instead travel across artistic, scientific, and activist contexts.
This makes him unusual among contemporary artists who, with the exception of conceptual photographers, such as Lynne Cohen (1944–2014), Martha Rosler (b.1943), or Thomas Struth (b.1954), are not generally known for producing work that conveys practical or sociological information. In fact, the invention of photography in the mid-nineteenth century and the professional threat it posed to artists, especially painters, forced them to abandon the applied uses of their medium for formal pursuits with which early photographers could not compete, including scale, colour, texture, style, and medium-specific effects. By mechanically usurping much of the practical uses of traditional artists’ skills—portraiture, illustration, the documentation of place, etc.—and through their medium’s experimental ethos, photographers inadvertently encouraged the formalist revolution that resulted in the non-objective abstractions quoted in so many of Burtynsky’s photographs.
In at least one regard, Burtynsky is an orthodox photographer. The practical information that he provides is useful to scientists and activists as they struggle with legislators who find it politically inconvenient to impose limits or conditions on industrial development. In that respect, his work is in the social reform spirit of Lewis Hine (1874–1940) and Jacob Riis (1849–1914), who exposed cruel child labour conditions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Or, more directly, the several early photographers who influenced public opinion concerning the industrial exploitation of the picturesque hinterland: Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), Timothy O’Sullivan, and others. Burtynsky’s pictures will also be useful in the future as we try to heal our habitat from two centuries of vigorous exploitation. The extremely fine detail provided by the artist’s advanced equipment and his technical sophistication can be enjoyed by anyone for the pleasure of its formal qualities, but experts can read it as data.
Lewis Hine, Group of Breaker Boys, Pittson, Pennsylvania, 1911, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Carleton Watkins, Smelting Works, New Almaden, 1863, silver albumen print, 41.4 × 52.4 cm, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
The journalistic and documentary dimensions of the work argue for its social relevance. Burtynsky records the constantly expanding human presence on the only planet that can sustain us, and that our ubiquitous species is overwhelming. Our cities have mostly deindustrialized in the advanced economies, increasingly relegating industry to secluded zones that are out of sight. As quality of life motivates us to isolate ourselves from the industrial activity that effects our environment, Burtynsky’s work is important and deserving of his wide audience: he keeps viewers abreast of otherwise occulted human activity and its impact. The evidence he gathers of industrial proliferation and settlement encroachment on nature is presented seductively but neutrally, therefore effectively. Using aesthetics to gain our attention, his pictures provide us with practical information that we can use to make political decisions and lifestyle choices.
AESTHETICIZING THE INAESTHETIC
Edward Burtynsky, Oil Spill #4, Oil Skimming Boat, Near Ground Zero, Gulf of Mexico, June 24, 2010.
Edward Burtynsky, Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community / Suburb, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, 2011.
The consistent and unresolvable tension between attraction and repulsion is among the more discussed aspects of Burtynsky’s work, described in terms of a “toxic sublime” that renders environmental devastation visually compelling while remaining ethically troubling. The sophistication and scale of his images, their stylistic seduction, and their troubling implications, all conspire to create this hybrid emotion in the viewer. Taken globally, his work is a scalable metaphor for the paradoxical postmodern human condition: we know full well that our addiction to convenience and plenty is at our looming peril but, according to Burtynsky’s evidence, this has yet to deter us or even slow us down.
The artist has sometimes been criticized for aestheticizing environmental degradation. Burtynsky’s response has been that the public would not be interested in his pictures if they didn’t have aesthetic appeal. As he has remarked, “If I make an ugly picture, people won’t look at it. If they don’t look at it, then I’ve lost my audience.” A lack of interest would keep us in the dark about the important information that they transmit. Moreover, not all of Burtynsky’s pictures represent ecological ruin. The wreckage presented in his works provides us with the lifestyle that few of us would happily forego. The emotionally effective irony of his beautiful pictures of ugly subjects, and the vulnerabilities of human nature that they expose, would be lost in a less aesthetically robust object.
Like beauty, ugliness is in the eye of the beholder. Burtynsky is not aestheticizing ugliness so much as expanding the repertoire of beauty, a project central to contemporary art. His subject is inherently beautiful to many of us who, like him, are moved by the wonder of large-scale industry and the elegant forms of its utilitarian logic. Though his images do not conceal the existential threat that they imply, his success is predicated not only on his artistic skills, but also on the novelty of his subject. Its relevance is reinforced by the wide circulation of his work—through major museum exhibitions, including Edward Burtynsky: Essential Elements, 2019–20, and Burtynsky: Extraction/Abstraction, 2024—as well as large-scale public installations such as In The Wake of Progress, 2022, in Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square, alongside publications and films such as Manufactured Landscapes, 2006—and by the sustained fascination of his broad international audience, which continues to engage with the uneasy coexistence of visual pleasure and environmental anxiety that his photographs stage.
Edward Burtynsky, Xiaolangdi Dam #1, Yellow River, Henan Province, China, 2011.
Edward Burtynsky at work in a quarry.