← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
New Photography Show Depicts Humanity's Impact On Nature
00:16:44
Photographer Edward Burtynsky discusses his new show The Great Acceleration at the International Center of Photography.
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- [00:09]
A
You're listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Photographer Edward Bertanski has spent more than 40 years documenting how human activity reshapes the earth. From textile mills in China to oil fields in Nigeria, from nickel tilly in Canada to the salt ponds of Senegal, his photographs capture the cost of of industrial civilization. His exhibition the Great Acceleration is his first major New York solo show in over two decades. It gathers images of his most iconic projects and places them all in one sweeping narrative about the last half century of human impact. Bertanski's photos are known for their size. They're mural sized prints that pull you in, making the scale impossible to ignore. You can see the Great Acceleration at the International center for Photography in Lower Manhattan. It'll run there until September 28th. Welcome to the studio.
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B
Great to be here, Alison.
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A
So what sets you on this path?
- [01:09]
B
Well, I hail from Canada, so. And as a young boy I was privileged to be able to go into the north and to really see what nature is. The kind of idea that we haven't done anything here. This is what nature intended on that landscape. And it is like looking into like deep time that this is kind of what the beavers and the deer saw tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago. So it's kind of a, kind of a window into what was intended for the planet. And then having grown up urban, I started to see the difference. And when I studied photography, I had to put myself through school. My father passed away when I was quite young and I worked in big industry, I worked in the mining industry, I worked in the big auto industries. And I saw these industries and realized that we, we don't really understand where things come from, whether the materials that we live with every day or even how they're made. And after graduating from school in the early 80s, I decided to take that on as a kind of lifetime work is to kind of pull the curtain back on where things come from and to show the scale of human impact on the planet with a kind of a eye on the fact that nature is suffering underneath our success. And so you can almost see it as a 40 year lament for a loss of something for our gain in a way.
- [02:36]
A
And for those of you who would like to see some of his photos, I went on Saturday and I took a lot of pictures and I just put them on our Instagram and our stories llofitwnyc Just so you can see the scale of them and what they're like against each other. When you look at the Pictures. When I went home and I looked at the pictures. Do you take a picture for the quote, unquote beauty of it, or are you image, or do you see an interesting image that you want to make?
- [03:05]
B
Well, it's more like I get an idea, get an idea and then I start to research where that is. Like, let's say my idea was I want to photograph a dam, like a big dam in the world. And so I start researching. I realize the biggest dam in the world is in China. This is in around 2000. So then I start researching how, how do I get there, who can help me get there? And then I find a helper and a fix who can get me there. And then I get there and I went back two, three times in the Three Gorges Dam. And, and that's, in a way, everything that I've done is not just any place. It's where's the largest example, you know, where, where are ships being broken in the world? Where, where's the biggest factories in the world in China again, And, and, and where's the biggest quarries in the world? In Carrera, in Italy or, or in Vermont? So in each of these, I'm actually, my research takes me to these largest examples. And in a way, the 40 year compendium, that's one through line of all of it, is that whether it's agriculture, industry, resource extraction, it's always the largest example I could find.
- [04:09]
A
So it's almost like storytelling in a way.
- [04:11]
B
It is, but I'm also trying to find the visual kind of connection to really get us, you know, to drop into the image, to kind of invoke a sense of wonder and invoke a kind of curiosity to say, well, well, where is this place? And how come I'm so unfamiliar with this? I mean, we see a lot of images every day, and if you look at the stats, I think 2 trillion images are made every year. So in that kind of crowded field, I'm really interested in making images that make us stop and make us think. And the landscape, I think, has that capacity because it really does reveal our value system. It really does reveal, like, what is we're up to. So if I was an alien from another planet, I'd be really interested in knowing what, you know, what we're doing to our planet. And I think these images are like an agriculture being the biggest. Like if we, if you look in United States of America, if you called it, 100% of where arable land is, 30% is agriculture, 1% is urban, less than 1% is industrial. So really the thing that we've done more to change the surface of the planet is farming.
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A
And before we get into detailed images, the name of the show is the Great Acceleration. What does that refer to?
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B
Well, it's really a scientific term and it really begins soon after World War II. So it's like really 1950 onwards. And what happens is we, you know, pre. That we weren't in a consumer marketplace. It was, you know, people bought what they needed more more often than not. And the 30s brought the. The Great Depression, and then coming out of the 30s, people weren't, you know, spending a lot of money. And then the Second World War happens, and then we end up in the 50s, and all of a sudden, you know, there's a surplus of things and manufacturing is getting more and more sophisticated. Cars are getting more cheap to own. And all of a sudden we're in this Great Acceleration. And then advertising comes in and makes us believe that, you know, buying things makes us happy. And then this consumer marketplace really takes off and it's really tracking that, that we see human explosion, where population goes from. Like when I was born in 55, there was, I think, 2.8 billion, and now there's over 8. So we're almost adding a decade, you know, a billion per decade. And. And this is really, you know, what we're seeing. And this is what's actually creating the big existential threat of, you know, loading the atmosphere with too much CO2 and the biodiversity that's being pushed back by human expansion.
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A
My guest is photographer Edward Bertanski. We're discussing his new exhibition, the Great Acceleration, now on view at the International center of Photography till September 28. Let's talk about a few pictures. This one is stunning. It's Salt River Pima and Maricopa Indian community. It's a 2001 photo, and it's these two communities up against each other. And on the right it's densely populated, and on the left it's undeveloped land. Back in 2001, first of all, what brought you to that particular site?
- [07:24]
B
Again, it's ideas. So, you know, I'm thinking about how do I tell the story of water? And it was all about trying to tell that story. And so when you look at that picture, you know, striking. It's striking. And it is like what is, you know, First Nations Reserve. And the other one is expansions in suburbs of Scottsdale, in a way, just expanding, tiny houses. And if you look, we're in the desert and almost every house has a pool and that's kind of what's really curious about that, is that here we are in a super scarce environment for water and everybody's got a pool because it is the desert. So it is, it's this contradiction that's sitting there for anybody to see. And it's a reminder that, you know, we expand into places that often, you know, weren't meant for human habitation and we're there for the grace of water, for instance, so the Colorado river and all of the aquifers in that region are, you know, what allows it to exist, the whole Phoenix area. And so should anything happen to the Colorado river water or should the aquifers go dry? There's a real existential threat to that whole community. And actually that community has one of the greatest preservation policies for conserving water. So they understand the need to be careful with it. But it still seems to be a nexus when everybody's got a pool in the desert.
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A
Mines and quarries are featured throughout your work. What keeps you returning to mines and quarries for your photographs?
- [09:05]
B
Quarries, I kind of stopped over a decade ago and because they were just such fascinating places, I went to different countries to see how they, you know, did the same kind of procedure of removing stone a block at a time and leaving these residual landscapes. But mining. What's interesting to me with mining is that it's the same kind of thing that I do with my photography. I go into somewhere where there really isn't what one would see as value, but, you know, something's there and you kind of harness that and then, and then distill it to something that has value. And I think, see that in my own photography, that going into these, you know, industrial places and bringing things back that tell a story, but also in a way that's compelling. But the other thing I think about mining that's really interesting is that we keep talking about net zero, 20, 50, you know, that we have to get. We have to try and remove all of our emissions from the air by then. And there's only one way to do that. And, and that is through going from a consumable energy grid, which is using natural gas, oil, coal, to a durables grid, which is using wind turbines, solar, geothermal, nuclear fusion, nuclear fission. All these things are pointing us to a direction in which we can make electricity. But that is a durables play. That is we have to mine our way there. We need so much copper. Like we've mined about 750 million tons of copper from the beginning of the copper age 7,000 years ago. We have to do that again in the next 25 years to get to net zero. So I think it's something that people don't really understand is that to get to a net zero we need heat pumps, electric motors, electrical grids, and not to mention what AI is doing and all the demands that it's going to need for electricity and more power. So it is very much. And our mines are actually almost depleted, so then there aren't that many new ones. And it takes about 15 years to get like a copper mine on stream. So we are hitting, I think we'll be hitting walls for our materials to build a net zero world.
- [11:12]
A
There is an image in the exhibit which spans two floors, the huge exhibit. What is that a picture of?
- [11:21]
B
Well, that's a picture of farming, pivot irrigation, and it's in Texas Panhandle. And again, because as I mentioned earlier, farming is one of the biggest impacts we have on the planet. Because when we're farming we're converting forests, prairies, wetlands into farms. And when we do that we're affecting the water. And when we do that we're affecting the life there. The birds and all the animals that lived in the forest or in the prairies or in the wetlands. So the thing that we've done that has the greatest impact on nature in a way is farming. And so that sits center of the show. It's 30ft by 30ft and it's pivot irrigation, which is the most advanced way of using an aquifer. So that's the Ogallala aquifer they're using there, which spans seven states. And in a way it's the most efficient way of farming. But the other thing that people don't really understand either is that in farming, 70% of everything that we grow in farms is used to feed the animals that we eat. And then 30% is we eat directly from like wheat and oats and things of that nature. But most of it is feeding the animals that we eat. So and you know, we use the most amount of water in irrigation. So I mean the Oglala Aquifer estimates were that there were 10 Lake Erie's of water trapped in there from 6 million years ago. And I think we've used up two already. And it's not replenishing. So it is a one way trip. And it remains to be seen what happens when you hear the bottom of the cup sucking sound from that aquifer.
- [13:01]
A
The size is so interesting of your work. Why do you choose that size? Why do you choose to make that one, that's 30 by 30. There are others that are just enormous pictures. Why do you choose those sizes?
- [13:15]
B
Well, that one in particular, David Campany, who I had the real privilege of working with, and he's one of the best curators in the world and just recently joined as a creative director at icp. But he saw that in my studio and he said, how big can you make that? And he knew that that wall was square and it fit perfectly. So I said, well, it was shot really with multiple frames, so there's a lot of information that I had to make that picture. So I said, I think we could do it. And I liked it because again, if you looked in this show, it shows my student work. And I was doing work in 1980, 81, I was photographing farming. Understanding at that time that it feels, it's something that feels benign. Farming, we all think it's a good thing and we get to eat and farmers are great and they bring. And it's true. But at the same time, we don't think of it as the thing that, you know, we think of mining and tailings, or we think of deforestation and all that as problematic. But we rarely think of farming as a big problem. But it is a big problem. And pesticides and fertilizers and all the things we use.
- [14:17]
A
It was interesting, interesting in the exhibit. It showed how you evolved as a photographer and now you shoot digital. You used to shoot film.
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B
Yeah, that's right.
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A
What does digital offer you?
- [14:30]
B
What it offers is, number one, and I used this way before I went into shooting digitally. But one of the great things it offers is complete control of the image. Contrast, density, sharpness, all of these things are really important as a Photoshop printmaking tool. The other thing it offers is if you shoot film, you can't stitch things together. Like Photoshop allows you to do multiple frames and stitch things together. So that big mural that you saw is a composite of six separate frames all stitched together. And taking a camera that might be, for instance, 100 megapixel camera into a 600 megapixel camera. So that allows me to make these huge enlargements and you can walk up to them and it still holds detail. So you're looking at billboard size images with the detail of something that's done, you know, in a smaller scale. So it allows me to work large scale, high detail. And to me, I really find that one of photography's great strengths is its ability to render detail and sharpness across a surface, across a plane, more so than our eyes can see. We can see that we see the world differently through a photograph than we do through our eyes. And we don't have the whole, you know, to 210 degree vision and our eyes only have 8 degrees of sharpness. Whereas here you're looking at this sharp field across the whole field. And there's a lot to look at in these places. So I really work a lot with the kind of crisp sharpness that photography can offer. And the digital technology today is astounding. You know, with the direct inkjet printers that work with an Epson printer and it gives me incredible quality. And then with the digital cameras, I'm creating kind of images that I couldn't even imagine. I shot 8x10 film before that and now I'm exceeding that quality.
- [16:19]
A
And you can shoot from a plane.
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B
I can shoot from a plane. And a lot. And a lot without changing roles of film. Yeah.
- [16:25]
A
The name of the show is the Great Acceleration. It is the Photography of Edward Bertanski. It's at the International center for Photography. The exhibit is up until September 28th. Thank you for making time to come visit us on all of it.
- [16:43]
B
It's a real pleasure. Thank you. Alison Limu Gamu and Doug Limu and.
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A
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