Edward Burtynsky’s Landscapes of Break 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 exterior Modesto, California. It was surreal, he advised me, nearly elegant. He felt as if he had entered a completely artificial world: thousands and thousands of tires stacked some 5 tales into the air, rubber hedgerows stretching to the horizon.

A couple of 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 finally 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. Regardless of their unlikely magnificence, Burtynsky’s altered landscapes have all the time functioned partially as a warning.

However since 2012, Burtynsky has tried to dedicate time every year to photographing “pristine landscapes,” capturing pictures of nature that encourage one thing extra like hope. Earlier this yr, he traveled to Shark Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage Web site at Australia’s farthest-western level. The bay is legendary for the stromatolites studding its shore, layered rock buildings fashioned over 1000’s 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 digital camera out of the passenger window of a Cessna 210. The bottom, he left untouched.

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