Human/Nature
- Diamond Zhou
- May 23
- 13 min read
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SATURDAY EVENING POST
May 23rd, 2026
By Diamond Zhou
Written with time, thought, and a human pulse.
Edward Burtynsky’s photographs have long occupied a singular place in contemporary art because they do not simply picture the world so much as return it to us in a state of heightened legibility, as though something that had always been there, all around us and beneath our lives, had at last become visible with a clarity too exact to ignore. Many artists have taken the altered landscape as their subject, and many have addressed the tensions between beauty and damage, industry and environment, use and loss, but Burtynsky’s work does something more disquieting than this familiar language can easily contain. He reveals the modern world not just in the language by which it usually describes itself, not as progress, growth, development, innovation, national ambition, economic necessity, or technological achievement, but as matter reorganized at immense scale, as the earth bearing the pressure of human intention, as history impress into form. Burtynsky reveals the physical systems modern life usually keeps out of sight. Extraction and infrastructure appear not as background conditions, but as visible forces that shape the land itself. One does not come away from these images with the sense of having learned a lesson so much as with the more unsettling feeling of having seen, perhaps too clearly, the terms by which our lives have been made possible.
Established in the 1880s, and at approximately 600 feet deep, Rock of Ages is the world’s largest ‘deep hole’ granite quarry. The stone mined here is known as ‘Barre Gray’ granite for nearby Barre, Vermont. Used primarily for headstones and mausoleums, its fine grain is also popular with sculptors.
— Extended wall label from Saatchi Gallery exhibition,
BURTYNSKY: Extraction / Abstraction
That clarity is inseparable from beauty, and this remains one of the reasons Burtynsky’s work continues to affect viewers with such unusual significance. The photographs are not accusatory, they do not ask us to approach through duty, or even through alarm. They arrive through seduction, through colour, structure, composition, scale, and the commanding composure of the image itself. A mine may splay out like an abstract painting, in wounds and flesh. A salt field may unfurl in tones iridescent and luminous they seem to belong to another realm. A tailings pond may shimmer in toxic golds. For a suspended moment the eye is simply held, and then recognition begins to take place. What seemed at first almost painterly clarifies as a record of labour, depletion, storage, dismantling, conversion, appetite. This delay is not incidental to the work; it is one of its most searching truths. Burtynsky understands that perception is never morally innocent, that beauty does not rescue us from the world’s entanglements but often leads us farther into them, and that the conscience may awaken not by turning away from splendour but by finding splendour where it did not expect to and then having to remain with the full difficulty of that recognition.
For this reason, his photographs exceed the category of environmental witness. What they illuminate is not only the fact of damage, but the condition of a civilization that has become so extensive in its powers, so far reaching in its demands, and so dependent upon systems too large to be grasped in ordinary experience, that it increasingly requires artists to render its material truth visible back to itself. Burtynsky’s subject, in this sense, is not only the altered landscape but the altered scale of human existence. We live within networks of extraction, transport, manufacture, circulation, excess, and waste that usually remain hidden behind the polished surfaces of daily life. The product arrives without its mine, the energy without its dam, the flight without its graveyard, the digital without its server farm. Burtynsky reverses that concealment. He shows that modernity is not weightless, immaterial, or abstract, but built from stone, metal, water, oil, salt, labour, and land. Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing offers a language strikingly close to what these photographs disclose: “Alienation obviates living space entanglement. The dream of alienation inspires landscape modification in which only one stand-alone asset matters. Everything else becomes weeds or waste.” Burtynsky’s photographs make that logic visible. They show landscapes reorganized around singular value, simplified toward extraction, and left behind when that value can no longer be produced. The visible world, in his images, becomes a vast and involuntary record of how these relations have been organized.
While hydroelectric dams such as this provide clean electricity, flood control, drinking water and farmland irrigation, these large-scale projects also come with a significant environmental and human cost. Since 1949, it is estimated that approximately 12 million people across China have been displaced due to dam construction, and at least 200,000 people were resettled for the development of this dam specifically. Pictured here is the annual silt — a solid, dust-like sediment made up of fine bits of clay and sand — release, a spectacle that draws tens of thousands of visitors to watch 30 million tons of silt be discharged.
— Extended wall label from Saatchi Gallery exhibition,
BURTYNSKY: Extraction / Abstraction
It is difficult to stand before these images for long without feeling that the old division between the human and the natural has become inadequate to the reality they disclose. The title Human/Nature names that difficulty, as it does not offer a reconciliation between the terms, nor does it permit them the comfort of clean separation. What it names, instead, is a strained relationship. The slash between the two words is not a bridge, but a mark that suggests contact, dependence, division, and injury all at once. Burtynsky’s photographs inhabit precisely this unstable territory. They do not present nature as a distant and untouched elsewhere waiting outside history to be admired, defended, or mourned, nor do they present humanity as an external force acting upon an otherwise inert world. The two are inevitably intertwined, often with a violence that is at once raw and grotesque. Matter has become historical, and history has become geological. Author and philosopher Donna Haraway’s refusal of the old nature and culture divide hovers near this work, as a thought it seems almost instinctively to share: nothing stands apart, no human system remains outside the ecologies it reorganizes, and no landscape can still be imagined as merely given once the full weight of labour, administration, desire, and consequence has passed through it.
One of the hardest truths Burtynsky’s photographs carry is that connection, by itself, is not necessarily morally positive. The crisis is not that we have become estranged from the earth, but that our contact with it has so often been one sided, intimate without reciprocity, transformative without accountability. A quarry is a relationship. A dam is a relationship. A tailings pond is a relationship. So too are a port, an oil field, a storage site, or a mountain of discarded tires. Each gives material form to the terms on which human systems now meet the earth. The question is not whether we are connected to the world, but what kind of connection we have forged, what sort of beings we have become through it, and what kind of world comes into view when those terms are made visible. This is where the photographs gather their philosophical force. They show a species at once ingenious and insatiable, disciplined and blind, capable of astonishing coordination and equally astonishing failures of restraint. They reveal a humanity that has learned to enter the earth almost everywhere while remaining spiritually uncertain of how to live within what it has entered.
If you’re familiar with Sudbury, Ontario and the drive through it, you’re likely equally familiar with the Copper Cliff mine and the wall of tailings along the north side of the highway. The area of this mining complex was expansive, about 20 km sq in total, including the tailings pond with walls that reached over 70m high in some places.
In 1996, I managed to get access to the top of this tailings area, permission given to me directly from Inco. On that trip I was accompanied by Rick Rhodes, then editor of Canadian Art, who published a story and photo essay about it in the magazine later that year, and Harry Knight, a retired geologist and former Inco employee.
When looking at this image, a lot of people think the colours are manipulated, but they’re not. That colour orange is a result of the fact that in the mining process they don’t remove the iron from the ore. They’ll remove the nickel, copper, traces of silver and other precious metals, but they don’t bother taking out the iron because it’s not profitable enough to remove it. So the iron oxide gets flooded into the tailings as waste — so what you’re looking at in this image and others from this particular series, are basically rivers of rust.
— Edward Burtynsky, for a “Weekly Reflection” (social media series) on Nickel Tailings
Burtynsky’s own growth gives this work an added and very moving gravity, because his vision did not arise from an abstract encounter with “the environment” but from a childhood in which labour, industry, land, and water were already deeply interwoven. Born in St. Catharines in 1955 to parents of Ukrainian heritage, he grew up in the industrial and agricultural atmosphere of Niagara, where the General Motors plant and the Welland Canal formed part of the visual and social fabric of daily life. His father worked on the GM production line and practised photography as an amateur; when Burtynsky was eleven, he was given his first camera, and as a boy he photographed machinery on factory open days and watched the great freighters passing through the canal. Burtynsky has himself said that early exposure to the GM plant and to ships moving through the Welland Canal helped shape his imagination for the scale of human creation, while later accounts of his youth in Niagara add other formative textures as well: fishing, foraging, gardening, and the fertile landscape that existed in intimate tension with industrial production.
Burtynsky grew up in a world where landscape and industry were bound together, where immigrant labour, machine scale, canal traffic, fertile soil, and the daily realities of work existed side by side, each shaping the other. One feels, in the mature photographs, not the discovery of a subject from outside, but the deepening of an early visual education in which landscape had already ceased to be innocent scenery and had become a place where human striving declared itself in steel, energy, and form. Even when the work broadens to encompass quarries in Italy or India, shipbreaking in Bangladesh, dams in China, oil fields, salt pans, and lithium mines across the globe, something of that early Niagara structure remains: the sense that beauty and use, labour and magnitude, making and unmaking, are not opposite conditions but neighbouring realities whose tensions must be endured rather than resolved.
The greatest users of centre pivot irrigation systems in the world are American. There are over 30,000 of these systems in use across the Texas High Plains alone, covering approximately 4.5 million acres of cropland, most of which is dedicated to either corn or cotton. The revitalisation of America’s “Dust Bowl” is largely owed to the invention of the centre pivot in the 1950s by a Nebraska farmer named Frank Zybach.
— Extended wall label from Saatchi Gallery exhibition,
BURTYNSKY: Extraction / Abstraction
This is why Burtynsky’s photographs allow neither nostalgia nor easy judgment. They offer no pastoral fiction of a world once untouched by human hands and waiting to be redeemed. Whatever innocence such a vision requires, these images do not sustain it for long. Yet they refuse cynicism as well. They do not suggest that because every landscape bears the marks of history, every transformation may therefore be excused. Burtynsky remains in the more difficult area, where awe and unease remain bound together, where admiration is shadowed by cost, and where the grandeur of human making cannot be separated from the remains it leaves behind. In On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin offers one of the bleakest and most enduring images of modern progress. Inspired by Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, he imagines the angel of history staring into the past, where others might see sequence, development, or advance. Benjamin writes: “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.” Walter Benjamin’s angel of history finds in Burtynsky’s photographs a distinctly contemporary terrain. Here the wreckage is rarely chaotic. It is patterned, administered, radiant, sometimes almost serene. The violence is procedural, and the destruction is cumulative. It arrives through repetition, coordination, and the patient normalization of systems whose scale ordinarily exceeds perception. The photographs make such scale available to feeling.
We move through lives made easier by systems whose material conditions lie elsewhere, hidden in distant geographies, obscured by specialized knowledge, and diffused across supply chains, contracts, and temporal delays. Burtynsky does not overcome that diffusion, but he does something equally important: he renders it visible. He shows that the earth is not merely where consequences arrive after the fact, but where they are written from the beginning. Land, in his photographs, ceases to be backdrop and becomes record. Water is never simply scenic; it is stored, redirected, rationed, monumentalized. Stone is never merely geological; it is opened, cut, and exposed to the will that would turn it into use. Colour itself becomes historically charged. In the salt pans, potash mines, iron ore sites, phosphor tailings, and lithium fields, one encounters tones of such radiance that the old separation between aesthetic delight and ethical unease begins to feel untenable. The eye is not misled by beauty here so much as implicated through it.
If Burtynsky’s images can feel severe, they are also, in a deeper sense, acts of care. Care as the discipline of seeing what one might prefer to keep abstract but also care as the insistence that the world be granted its full material dignity even when what it reveals is difficult to bear. There is a tenderness in this severity, a conviction that the altered earth deserves more than statistics, more than policy discourse, more than the vague moralizing that so often surrounds environmental subjects. It deserves the fullness of attention, the exactness of composition, the long labour of making an image adequate to what has been done, and to the strange, terrible beauty with which the world continues to answer back.
The landscape in this region is defined by both the contours of the natural landscape and the hard borders of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community meeting urban sprawl. The housing development pictured here is in Scottsdale, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix—one of the largest urban centres by area in the United States. Over the last twenty years Phoenix, a growing metropolis in a desert region, reduced its overall water use by 30 percent, and successfully diversified its water sources.
Yet the region has experienced a drought for the past fifteen years, and its end is impossible to predict. While the population of the Phoenix area expands further, there will be increasing pressure on available surface water. Historical precedents should give city builders pause. Over fifteen hundred years ago, the region’s Hohokam peoples built a civilization whose area nearly matched contemporary Phoenix by creating the largest irrigated area in pre-modern America. However, after an extended drought in the mid-1400s dried up their ingeniously utilized surface-water resources, they disappeared.
The Central Arizona Project is working towards further diversion of the Colorado River, but as with the Hohokam experience, surface water resources are susceptible to extended drought. Between 2015 and 2019, surface water was once again the primary water source for Phoenix, accounting for 52 percent, continuing to drain a vanishing resource.
— An excerpt from Water
The quieter works in Burtynsky’s larger body of work, mountains, dunes, volcanic terrain, coastlines, birdlife, the less visibly industrial orders of the world, do not contradict the harder truths elsewhere so much as widen them. They remind us that the earth exceeds every system by which we organize it. There remain scales, migrations, durations, and presences not reducible to human intention, however insistently human systems attempt to render the planet legible through use. Such images do not restore innocence, but they restore proportion. They invite, too, what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls a return of curiosity, a willingness to look beyond the simplifications of progress narratives and attend again to the uneven, stubborn life that persists within damaged worlds. They remind us that what is at stake is not simply the management of resources or the mitigation of damage, but the larger question of how a species comes to understand itself once it can no longer deny that it has written its desires into the surface of the world.
Perhaps this is why Edward Burtysnky’s works stood the test of time and continues to be relevant. They ask us much more than understanding, compassion, and care: that we become equal to what we have made visible, equal to the scale of our own inscriptions, equal to the knowledge that the earth is not the background to our history but its primary texts. To stand before these works is to encounter a world in which beauty is not innocent, matter is not mute, and our imagination cannot pretend that what sustains us leaves no trace. The work does not offer absolution but a sense of recognition, and with that, perhaps, the beginning of a more answerable form of thought.
A message from Paul Kyle
Edward Burtynsky’s work had long occupied a place of deep admiration in my mind. I always felt that he is an artist whose work mattered not only visually, but morally, philosophically, and historically. His photographs do not simply document the world; they ask us to reckon with it. Few artists can make us feel both humility and accountability so powerfully. He simply shows us, and in showing us, makes us see.
There is something profoundly moving in that act of seeing. Art, at its highest level, gives form to what might otherwise remain unfelt or unspoken. It awakens us, and, in doing so, alters the way we live with it. Ed’s work does exactly that. His photographs capture the marks humanity leaves upon the land, but they also reveal the difficult and undeniable beauty of those transformations. That tension is where the work lives, and where it continues to affect us most deeply.
I want to express my sincere gratitude to Ed, his wife and business partner Julia Johnston and to their entire team. Exhibitions of this significance do not come into being through vision alone. They are made possible through trust, generosity, collaboration, and an immense amount of work behind the scenes. We are profoundly thankful for the support that Ed, Julia, and their team have extended to us throughout this process. Their partnership has made it possible for this exhibition to take its full shape.
It is a tremendous privilege to be working with Edward Burtynsky, to share these extraordinary photographs with our community, and a joy to help create the conditions in which they can be properly encountered and considered. To bring this exhibition to life has been both an honour and a responsibility.
UPCOMING EXHIBITION
This exhibition at Paul Kyle Gallery offers a powerful survey of Edward Burtynsky work, revealing the complex and often uneasy relationship between human industry and the natural world through images of striking beauty and consequence. It will be the first major show of his work in Vancouver in over a decade.
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