To mark the opening of his new exhibition at Saatchi Gallery, London, Edward Burtynsky talks to Tracy Calder about fishing, photography, eco-anxiety and the benefits of being a perfectionist
When Edward Burtynsky was a child, he grew up to the soundtrack of the General Motors plant in St Catharines, Ontario. ‘We would drive past and all you could hear was ba-boom, ba-boom,’ he recalls as we settle down for a chat. St Catharines was a blue-collar city and his father, Peter, had secured work on the production line at the factory.
‘There was a red brick wall that ran for about half a kilometre and from behind it there came a noise so loud that you could feel the earth shake,’ he explains. When Edward was seven, he attended an open day at the plant and was amazed by what he found there. ‘I saw molten metal going down chutes, big presses in action and people wearing aluminium suits that made them look like Martians,’ he laughs.
All the while, ba-boom, ba-boom rang out like a heartbeat. To a child born at the beginning of the Space Race, this odd environment where humans and technology worked side by side must have seemed intoxicating. ‘I realised that there was this whole other world,’ he says. ‘It was like going into the bowels of the machine while knowing that every time we drove past, we were riding in the thing the plant was making!’
Edward received his first camera at the age of 11 (a gift from his father, who was a keen amateur photographer), but it would be more than two decades before the ‘man-altered landscape’ became his primary focus. By then, he had put himself through college and university by working in factories, just like his father. All that changed in the early eighties. ‘Recently I came across a journal from 1983 which contains a paragraph where I define my life’s work,’ he smiles. At the time, Edward was on a solo trip across North
America (partly funded by an arts grant), travelling with a 5x4in camera, a stack of film, a tent, fishing gear and some money for petrol. ‘I fished and photographed for four months,’ he grins. Halfway through the trip he began making notes about the trajectory of human population growth. ‘I was looking at the scale of resource extraction and all the technology that accompanies human expansion and I was thinking how frightening and unsustainable it was,’ he recalls. ‘I decided to find the largest examples of the human footprint and to make photographing them my life’s work.’
Nothing less than perfect
Speaking to Edwa
