Postcards from the edge

Photographer Edward Burtynsky talks to Alastair Sooke about the toxic allure of the world’s most perilous places

‘I’ ve been to China a dozen times,” says the 61-year-old landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky, “but I’ve never visited the Great Wall.” He smiles. “I don’t go to tourist places. I enter into worlds behind chain-link fences and barbed wire.” For more than three decades, this soughtafter Canadian artist has documented some of the most perilous locations on the planet – from rivers of toxic waste in Ontario, to the noxious ship-breaking yards on the beaches of Bangladesh.

His densely detailed colour photographs, taken using a large-format camera, typically present the disastrous impact of heavy industry and agriculture upon the natural environment. They are awesome, in the traditional sense of inspiring thunderstruck wonder. “Maybe one day I should do a tourist’s trip to see things like the Terracotta Army,” he tells me. But we both know that is never going to happen. A new book, Essential Elements, is due to be published later this month, offering a fresh look at his impressive career. More than half of its photographs have never been seen before. To coincide with it, Flowers Gallery in east London is mounting a special exhibition of Burtynsky’s work. As well as spectacular prints of images in Essential Elements, the show will include several pictures from his latest series, Salt Pans: extraordinary aerial photographs of a salt marsh in Gujarat, India, where more than 100,000 workers extract a million tonnes of salt from the floodwaters of the nearby Arabian Sea every year.

“I spent a week flying over the area in a fixed-wing Cessna,” recalls Burtynsky, who uses a gyro-stabilised digital camera for aerial photography. “The landscape had this beautiful neutral grey background. But the salt also produced all these different colours: greens, oranges, reds. Visually, I thought that was fabulous.”

Burtynsky lives in Toronto, but we meet at Flowers Gallery, in an office decorated with one of his distinctive images: a large, powerful photograph of a railway line blasted into the sheer rocky slope of a forbidding mountain in British Columbia.

Even though it dates from early in his career – it was taken in 1985, just three years after Burtynsky had graduated in Photography from Toronto’s Ryerson University – it is, in many ways, emblematic of his work. The track is visible near the bottom, but only just: most of the composition revels instead in the abstract patterns formed by the flank of the mountain.

The hues of this rock face – russet, ochre and white, offset by the greys of the scree – provide swirls of colour, creating a painterly effect. There is no focal point, but a flattening of space,

‘I don’t go to tourist places. I enter into worlds kept behind barbed wire’

Terrible beauty: Burtynsky’s pursuit of industrydamaged landscapes has taken him to a copper mine in Western Australia, above, the salt marshes of Gujarat, left, and an oil tanker graveyeard off the Bangladesh coast, top right