Massive scale is a defining feature of the recent past. There were big things in antiquity—the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico; the Colossus of Rhodes, which stood at two thirds the height of the Statue of Liberty until an earthquake snapped it at the knees in 226 BCE—but there weren’t many of them. Not long ago I climbed to the top of St. Olaf’s Church in Tallinn, Estonia, which the tour guide claimed was the tallest building on earth into the seventeenth century; it was tall, but not what we’d call Tall. Not far from my home on the western shore of Lake Champlain lies the ore bed that in 1875 produced 10 percent of America’s iron ore; the #21 pit, once storied, stretches two hundred feet wide and three hundred feet deep. So—big. But a generation later, with the discovery of iron ore in Minnesota’s Mesabi Range, we begin to reach modern-scale Big. The Hull-Rust-Mahoning Mine in Hibbing (whose native son sang about it in “North Country Blues”) is three and a half miles wide, eight miles long, and 535 feet deep. There’s a visitor’s center on the edge offering a view, though it had to be moved in 2019 to allow for the expansion of the mine.
The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is perhaps the greatest chronicler of that era of scale, which stretched across the long twentieth century and only now shows the first signs of receding. He managed, by accident of geography and timing and by dint of temperament and technological skill, to be perfectly placed to make this new gigantism legible. The son of Ukrainian immigrants, he grew up in St. Catharines, Ontario, where his father worked at a General Motors plant. Early in his new biography of Burtynsky, James King quotes him describing a youthful visit to the factory:
At the age of seven I saw engines being cast and steering knuckles being stamped out of red-hot ingots held with tongs by men in silver suits on massive forge presses that shook the ground and could be heard halfway across the city.
He could ride his bike to the Welland Canal, which routed maritime traffic around Niagara Falls between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. He traded fruit with the sailors for cigarettes: “I remember being overwhelmed by the scale of the ships.” After working for a while at the GM plant (removing carcinogenic PCBs from machines on the assembly line), he moved to Toronto in his mid-twenties to study photography at the Ryerson Institute of Technology:
I remember the first time I came to Toronto alone. I found myself looking up at skyscrapers… I was bowled over by the scale at which we operate, the kind of things we can create. For things to be on this scale, I thought, there has to be something equally monumental in the landscape where we have taken all this material from.
That insight accounted for his first great works. After early studies of taxidermy and local farming, he found his eye in the early 1980s with a series of images of mines and quarries, subjects he has returned to again and again. These are the negative spaces that supplied the material for the spectacular constructions of our modern world. Some of his first successful images came from the Rock of Ages quarry in Barre, Vermont, at six hundred feet the world’s largest deep-hole granite quarry:
I would find the right location and then light up a hash spliff just enough to shift my perception and dial down the noise in my head yet not altering enough that I would be unsafe standing on edges of the quarries on broken and unstable rocks.
The images he produced were serene and geological, a record of deep time as much as of space, and they were popular—he made enough to bail out his flailing Toronto darkroom. Soon he was headed for the marble quarries of Carrara in Italy, sometimes with his lens focused on the rock and sometimes backing up far enough to situate the quarries in the surrounding mountains and forests.
He broadened his work to other mines: his home province of Ontario provided the cautionary tale of Sudbury, where nickel mining and smelting and its associated pollution had produced a dead zone of astonishing proportion, and Elliot Lake, once among the largest uranium mines on earth, whose tailings had overflowed the surrounding landscape, wiping out much of the surrounding forest. He moved on to other kinds of “mines”—the graveyards where discarded metal was condensed into cubes, the great piles of tires that stretched for many acres across the California landscape. One of those piles (in an abandoned quarry) had caught fire two years before and was still burning:
Intrigued by the image this evoked, we set out with all my equipment to go and take a look. It was an apocalyptic scene, and we could only stay for about twenty minutes because of the splitting headaches and wheezing lungs brought on by the smoke and tire fumes.
Burtynsky’s work is not particularly judgmental—there’s beauty to be found even in these objectively ugly scenes. But his task seems to be recording the sheer size of it all, an effort simply to chronicle what mankind at this moment was doing.
There’s a useful contrast to be made with the other great photographer mining this vein (sometimes literally), Burtynsky’s friend Sebastião Salgado. It is as if, unconsciously and as a matter of temperament, they had divided up the work, with Salgado’s much more politically charged photos concentrating on the workers involved in extraction while Burtynsky viewed the resulting landscapes. The division is by no means absolute, and Burtynsky has many fine shots of people involved in these projects, but the differences are telling. Salgado, for instance, produced a memorable series of images in the 1990s of “ship-breakers” on the beaches of Bangladesh—companies disposing of giant seagoing vessels would run them aground at high tide, and armies of men would descend to take them apart for scrap, a dangerous form of mining that completed the industrial cycle. Salgado wrote, “I wanted to pay homage to all the men and women who built the world around us,” and his pictures capture the brutality of the work.
Burtynsky followed him to the Bay of Bengal a few years later, photographing similar scenes on the Indian coast, but his eye focused on “a landscape littered with rusting colossi that loomed silently over scores of workers.” He said later:
One can look at these images as making political statements about the environment, but they also celebrate the achievements of engineering or the wonders of geology…. I’m not using my art to browbeat corporations for the rack and ruin of our landscape. I’m trying [to cut] a slice out of the chaos and give [it] visual coherence so that the viewer can decide.
In any event, King writes, the two weeks of shooting on the beach in 2000 produced twenty-four images that “emphasize the size of the vessels, as huge, hideous sculptures that exist in a sinister twilight.” He’s right, I think, to pair them in his book with an image of Richard Serra’s giant sheets of rusting steel at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Monumentality really is part of Burtynsky’s brief. He became expert at photographing from helicopters and then from drones, and his show at the International Center of Photography last summer included a thirty-by-thirty-foot image of a High Plains Texas industrial farmscape taken from thousands of feet up; it was, if you think about it, a picture of a mine extracting fertility from the soil (and water from the depleting aquifers beneath it) to produce cheap plenty.
In his effort to understand our time on earth, Burtynsky had to figure out how to chronicle its single most important element. Oil unleashed the mobility that rewrote the American landscape and produced both the highest concentrations of wealth and its greatest and most democratic spread; it powered the militaries of the twentieth century and also gave them something to fight over. But it’s not the easiest thing to take a picture of: the “mining” happens deep underground, where a drill bit punctures a reservoir, and the resulting product is (hopefully) contained inside a series of pipes and tanks up to the moment when it leaves your tailpipe in a (largely invisible) cloud of carbon dioxide and various trace gases. Burtynsky took some haunting images of fields full of oil derricks, both in California and in Baku, Azerbaijan, the site of the world’s first big offshore oil fields. He also photographed in the tar sands of Alberta, perhaps the single biggest scar humans have inflicted on the planet. But I think his more important achievement was to figure out how to depict the consumption of oil.
Three pictures in particular—all of which were in the ICP show—seem crucial to me. The first is a sweeping shot of the NASCAR races at Alabama’s Talladega track, where spectators have gathered to watch (and perhaps more importantly to listen to) this festival of internal combustion. “Such races have been photographed many times,” he said, “but I am interested in tying it in with the body of work I have done as an expression of the scale of motor culture, where everybody is rallying around the machine.” No image has captured American automotive joy with such clarity.
The second and third images are more mixed. One is of a crowded stretch of highway-adjacent roadway in Breezewood, Pennsylvania, filled with the neon logos of our age—Exxon, Shell, and Sunoco dominate, but so do McDonald’s and Subway and Starbucks; to the standard American eye it manages to be both cluttered and relaxing. The other, which David Campany uses as the cover of the catalog for the ICP show, is of Scottsdale, Arizona. It’s perfectly bifurcated by a road: on one side, an Indian reservation, it’s essentially untouched desert; on the other it’s a suburb crowded with tiled roofs, swimming pools, and enormous suburban houses. If it weren’t so absorbing, it would be a touch didactic.
Still, the most important result of this era was essentially invisible: the concentration of colorless CO2 building up in the atmosphere as the coal and gas and oil combusted. The greenhouse effect came to public notice just as Burtynsky’s career was taking off, with James Hansen’s 1988 congressional testimony roughly coinciding with his first important images. But the irony of global warming was that it was, for several decades, largely impossible to see. I can remember photographers phoning me in those early years to ask what they should be taking pictures of. Only a few managed to really pull it off, perhaps most notably James Balog, who used time-lapse photos to great effect in his Chasing Ice series, which documented the decline of the great glaciers.
In recent years it’s become tragically easy to document the floods and fires that climate change is now producing (though the biggest effects, on systems like the jet stream and the Gulf Stream, remain hard to render). Burtynsky supplied one of the most important of these images last year, just in time to make the ICP show, where it was hung at the last minute next to the cash register but too late to be included in the catalog. It’s an aerial shot of the aftermath of the fire at Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles in January 2025, with insanely crisp detail of the ashy remains of one house after another. It shows the ultimate end of all that oil, in a kind of mirror image of the suburban sprawl he’d captured in Arizona and elsewhere. It was the most gripping picture on view.
Burtynsky is at the height of his powers, and far be it from me to suggest where he should train his lens. But I’m taken by the idea that he may be well suited to document the next, perhaps more hopeful, era in our large-scale interaction with our environment. Burtynsky shot many great series of China’s rise as a manufacturing power—enormous photos of enormous factories, with uncountable ranks of workers producing the endless collection of inexpensive stuff that marks the early twenty-first century. But now many of those factories are turning out solar panels and wind turbines, which are being installed in China and around the world at a remarkable pace.
In one sense this is just a continuation of the old story—and Burtynsky has produced a haunting image (in some ways, I think, a paean to the late Salgado) of an African mine supplying the cobalt necessary for some of these remarkable machines. But in another sense these are quite different products. Instead of extracting fossil fuels, they harvest the inexhaustible resources of sun and wind; the mining required is to build the machines, not to fuel them. Over time, if they spread, our impact on the earth should begin to recede, or at least to change—nearly half the shipping on the planet, for instance, carries hydrocarbons back and forth across the seas to be burned, an increasingly unnecessary task. Fields of solar panels take up space, but much more benignly than what they replace; farmers are discovering that the shaded rows they create are excellent for growing many crops.
Industrial postmodernity needs a chronicler, and it would be poetic if Burtynsky were able to end his career documenting at least the start of the massive repair project that one hopes will come to occupy our species.