Edward Burtynsky: Minescapes

Requisite viewing for the landscape architect these works capture the precarious synthesis of the natural and the artificial without judgment.

World-renowned landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky is committed to hunting down the industrial landscapes that explain the journeys made by manufactured materials. His landscapes are strange in that they depict what is not there: foreign origins, strange destinations and dangerous recycling methods. For Burtynsky these are the unseen landscapes that define our time.

Conscious of the fact that it is China who manufactures our everyday existence, Burtynsky began documenting the industrial landscapes of this manufacturing behemoth. While visiting Baosteel, China’s biggest steelworks, Burtynsky asked the company where all the iron was coming from. The answer was BHP Billiton in Western Australia. Several months later, with the support of the Museum of Western Australia and the Fotofreo Festival, Burtynsky was in Australia photographing the mines and helping us to understand the scale of the world’s appetite for resources. Among the mines photographed is Mt Whaleback. Australia’s biggest open-cut iron-ore mine, Mt Whaleback produces over 30 million tonnes of ore each year, which is transported to port using 150 kilometres of custom-built track. When the mine is finished the volume of spoil removed from Mt Whaleback could easily bury Sydney’s CBD hundreds of metres deep in rubble with a little left over for a neighbouring suburb. And no, we would not even see Sydney Tower protruding through the pile of fill.

An open-cut mine is developed to exploit mineral-rich veins of ore that run deep into the earth. After excavation it is not simply a void but has its own structure and landscape architecture. A mine needs to be engineered so that the walls do not collapse, the maximum amount of ore can be extracted with the minimum amount of waste and the supersize ore-hauling trucks and other heavy equipment can drive in and out of the pit. The amount of minerals and waste produced depends on the richness of the ore. For example, to gain one tonne of iron from 0.5 percent iron ore, 200 tonnes must be mined of which 199 tonnes are left as waste.1 At the Super Pit in Kalgoorlie, a CAT 793 hauling truck carries 225 tonnes of ore. As there is an average of 2 grams of gold per tonne of ore, each truck carries between 450 to 500 grams of gold;if it were all in one nugget it would be about the size of a golf ball. However every truck does not carry ore. Five out of six trucks leaving the mine only carry waste.2

Otter Juan/Coronet mine #1, 2007, Edward Burtynsky, Kalgoorlie.

Otter Juan/Coronet mine #1, 2007, Edward Burtynsky, Kalgoorlie.

As well as the waste rock that transforms the surrounding landscape there are also tailings - silts and sands suspended in copious amounts of polluted water, which are the remains of ore that has been processed. The typical strategy for disposing of tailings is to build an earthen dam and allow the slurry and sediment to fall out of suspension and for the water to drain away or evaporate. Leachate is another kind of waste that seeps through both the mine itself and the waste banks or bunds; it can be strong and acidic enough to sterilize streams and creeks. Burtynsky’s works document the above processes as landscapes of beautiful anxiety. The images of the mines are the modern equivalent of nineteenth-century sublime. Burtynsky’s industrial sublime takes the great landscape tradition of artists (such as Carleton Watkins and his photographs of the Yosemite Valley and William Turner and his paintings of storms and tempests) and turns it on its head. In Burtynsky’s works nature is no longer omnipotent - it is instead locked in a deadly embrace with the artificial, which has become omnipresent. It seems we are dwarfed by our own creations.

Burtynsky’s hard-hitting works are designed to confront the viewer in two ways: an initial visceral reaction followed by a continuing intellectual engagement. In doing so, the works elicit more than a simple aesthetic response from the viewer. At first the large photographs, and even larger subjects, seem to envelope the viewer and draw them in for a closer examination. Upon stepping towards the work, an increasing number of details introduces narratives that the viewer is able to relate to on a more human scale.

The hyper reality of the works is made possible through the large format cameras Burtynsky uses, which include 4 x 5 and 8 x 10 cameras and a digital Hasselblad on a gyroscopic mount for aerial work. The resulting images are impossible to capture in video formats or even from viewing the scene in person. Such is the detail in his images that the grit in the mines becomes tactile. This combination of hyper reality, excessive detail and the endless repetition of material and form overwhelms the viewer, confronting them with the vastness of the works of humanity and presenting a limitless artificiality.

Silver Lake operations #15, 2007, Edward Burtynsky, Lake Lefroy.

Silver Lake operations #15, 2007, Edward Burtynsky, Lake Lefroy.

There is a crystal clear quality to Burtynsky’s works, partly because he waits until there is a lack of shadows and dust across the many kilometres of airspace above the mines. He rarely engages with full sunlight instead preferring to interpret the scene in terms of its volumetric space. By showing every plane and through the immediacy of the viewpoint, perspective is reduced and the spaces are democratically presented. Like a photographic Picasso, Burtynsky presents an incredible number of facets to the viewer.

The most seductive and intriguing of images in the exhibition are the fifteen photographs of Silver Lake Operations in Kambalda. Perhaps it is the incongruity of seeing an open-cut pit in the centre of a milky white salt lake or the way that the hidden alchemy of transforming ore into nickel has been made explicit - either way, these are some of the most handsome images of Burtynsky’s career. Like the very best of his photographs, the Silver Lake series captures the precarious synthesis of the natural and the artificial without judgment. This translates into anxiety, or even fear, as we are seduced by the beauty of the images and the conflicting sense that this is some arcane experiment in civilization on the edge of disaster. For the landscape architect, Burtynsky’s works are requisite viewing. But be careful, they might just make you reconsider that precious gold engagement ring you were going to give your lover.

1 Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: a field guide to the industrial landscape (New York: Norton, 2005), 27.
2 KCGM, “The Super Pit FAQ,” on the Super Pit website, http://www.superpit.com.au/FAQ/tabid/72/Default.aspx.

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Published online: 1 May 2010
Words: Scott Hawken

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Landscape Architecture Australia, May 2010

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