Evocative images captured from air
Photographer finds beauty in patterns of altered landscapes
Industrial waste is usually out of sight and out of mind, just like our household garbage, once it’s abandoned curbside or dumped down a chute.
There are people out there, however, who are fascinated by the monumental impact of human activity on our landscapes and show it to us with an artist’s eye.
Toronto-based photographer Ed Burtynsky has earned international renown for his large-format images and his documentary Manufactured Landscapes, which reveal the huge scale and terrible beauty of tire dumps, oil extraction, engineering projects, mine tailings and effluent — even the factory floor — when seen through his creative lens.
Aerial photographer and Ottawa resident Louis Helbig (www.louis helbig.com) is another who has found inspiration in industrial dregs and destruction, documenting the patterns he sees from his winged perspective.
I met Helbig at the Interior Design Show in Toronto last month standing beside the one image he had on display there. It was light, almost sunny, with yellows in a river delta pattern on the left and a block of white demarcated by a sharp diagonal edge on the right. It appeared abstract, but the title “Sulfur and Snow” suggested something quite other.
In fact, it shows what Helbig estimates using Google Earth to be a 15-acre (6-hectare) corner, or about 3 per cent, of the largest of three piles of sulfur extracted by Syndcrude’s Mildred Lake upgrader in the Alberta tarsands. In all, these stockpiles, configured like step pyramids, cover some 903 acres, (about 366 hectares), a graphic reminder of the bitumen’s high sulfur content. Also at Mildred Lake are tailing ponds, including one held in place by what is considered the largest embankment dam in the world.
Helbig describes the tarsands operations as an “unbelievably huge and surreal place.”
His limited edition photograph, mounted and priced at $3,500, was big at 40 inches by 60 inches (about 1 by 1.5 metres), the largest size he sells. It’s part of his tarsands series called “Beautiful Destruction” (www.beautifuldestruction.ca).
He takes his photos with a digital Nikon 300 from his own little two- seater plane, a 1946 Luscombe, which he starts by manually turning the propeller, just as you would crank an old Model T. As a boy in Williams Lake, B.C., flying with his father, he became fascinated by aviation. With a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, Hel- big used to hold down what he describes as a paper pushing bureaucrat’s job in Foreign Affairs in Ottawa, but abandoned that for his art, which combines two things he loves: photography and flying. Environmental organizations find his tarsands images too beautiful for their purposes, but Helbig believes these photographs help initiate a vital conversation. “I’ve learned that the imagery can engage,” he says. And engagement, Helbig believes, is needed for the nation to grapple with the complex tarsands issue. “This huge thing was happening and there was no reporting of it,” he says of when he first started photographing the sites. “It was not reflected in the mainstream media and was not part of the political process.” Information was, however, percolating at another level, through Tim Hortons across the nation, resulting in a migration to Fort Mcmurray for jobs. Helbig is encouraged now by emerging discussions, fueled by the Keystone pipeline debate south of the border and the hearings for the Northern Gateway pipeline to Kitimat, B.C., in which the First Nations are playing a critical role.
A couple of years ago, as he was winging his way back to Cornwall, Helbig happened upon another subject that fascinates him. He glimpsed what appeared to be a house in the river, but then realized he was looking at the remains of towns, foundations and roads, flooded by the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1958.
The water, in recent years, has become crystal clear, Helbig says, thanks to invasive zebra mussels. He captures the ghostly patterns of those lost hamlets in images, awash in blues and greens, producing a series called “Sunken Villages” (www.sunkenvillages.com), yet more reminders of our altered landscapes.
His “Beautiful Destruction” series is on display in an exhibition in Almonte, about 50 kilometres southwest of Ottawa, until April 12. e_moorhouse@sympatico.ca