Edward Burtynsky’s Landscapes of Damage and Inspiration

The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has constructed a profession documenting what he calls “altered landscapes”—tangled freeway overpasses, sprawling oil refineries, mountainsides pockmarked by human exploitation. In 1999, he visited a tire-disposal website outdoors Modesto, California. It was surreal, he instructed me, virtually elegant. He felt as if he had entered a completely artificial world: hundreds of thousands of tires stacked some 5 tales into the air, rubber hedgerows stretching to the horizon.

Just a few months later, the tire pile was struck by lightning and burst into flames. The hearth burned as scorching as 2,000 levels and stuffed the sky with a thick black smoke. After a month, it was ultimately extinguished, however the tires had melted into greater than 250,000 gallons of molten oil that risked seeping into the soil and native water provide. Despite their unlikely magnificence, Burtynsky’s altered landscapes have at all times functioned partially as a warning.

But since 2012, Burtynsky has tried to dedicate time annually to photographing “pristine landscapes,” capturing photographs of nature that encourage one thing extra like hope. Earlier this 12 months, he traveled to Shark Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site at Australia’s farthest-western level. The bay is known for the stromatolites studding its shore, layered rock constructions shaped over hundreds of years by microorganisms that develop, die, and calcify with sediment into marine mushroom caps. Stromatolites are thought-about the oldest-known fossils on the planet, a residing file; some in Shark Bay would have witnessed a time earlier than people invented the tire—or the wheel. Burtynsky seen the stromatolites and the remainder of Shark Bay’s shoreline solely from the air, angling his digicam out of the passenger window of a Cessna 210. The floor, he left untouched.

This article seems within the December 2025 print version with the headline “Wheels Up.”