This is an epic, awesome exhibition, maybe the best exhibition currently on in London, certainly the most visually stunning one I’ve been to this year. It is not just a ‘photography exhibition’ but a display of masterpieces by a photographer of genius.

Typically awesome aerial photograph of Thjorsá River #1, Iceland (2012) photo © Edward Burtynsky. Courtesy Flowers Gallery, London

Largest ever Burtynsky exhibition

It is the largest exhibition ever mounted of the work of world-renowned photographic artist, Edward Burtynsky. Born in Canada in 1955, Burtynsky has spent over 40 years documenting the generally ruinous impact of human industry around the planet, in series of projects focused on environment-changing human activities such as mining, oil production, agriculture and so on.

Nickel Tailings #34, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada (1996) photo © Edward Burtynsky. Courtesy Flowers Gallery, London

It’s a big exhibition in every sense. They’ve brought together 94 of Burtynsky’s large-format photographs and the thing to grasp is that his photos are not just big, they’re massive, huge, enormous. You can only fit so many of these monsters into one space so the show is spread across 6 big galleries over two floors.

Uralkali Potash Mine #1, Berezniki, Russia (2017) photo © Edward Burtynsky. Courtesy Flowers Gallery, London

In addition to the 80 or so enormous digital prints there are 13 high-resolution murals i.e. photos blown up to cover entire walls, which overawe you with their scale and then draw you in to study the incredibly fine digital detailing.

Example of a wall-size ‘mural’ photo at ‘Burtynsky: Extraction/Abstraction’ giving a sense of the size of the ‘mural’ photos. Photo © Justin Piperger (2024) Image courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery, London

Factual captions

Each photo comes with a fact-packed wall label which explains the human activity we’re looking at. Often curatorial wall labels are barely worth reading or contain tiresome lectures from the curators about the tired old subjects of race or gender. By complete contrast, the wall labels in this exhibition are head and shoulders above the usual ruck because every one tells a fascinating story and gives you the hard facts without moralising. The facts are enough.

So, for example, the piece below is an aerial photo taken just outside the Atlantic port city of Cadiz in south-west Spain. The city is surrounded by salt marshes which once brought prosperity to the region by making it a major producer of sea salt. Snaking through the salt marshes are streams of turquoise sea water. Around these are a complex series of ridges which divide the marshes into ‘fields’ where salt can be harvested, some of which date from 1,200 BC. At the start of the 20th century some 160 artisanal sea salt producers worked these salt pans, now it’s down to just a handful.

Salinas #2, Cádiz, Spain (2013) photo © Edward Burtynsky. Courtesy Flowers Gallery, London

Extraction and the environment

It is a highly environmentalist exhibition (where environmentalist is defined as ‘concerned with or advocating the protection of the environment.’) Almost all the pieces show the catastrophic impact of human activity on the natural world, each image accompanied by fascinating, often profoundly dismaying information. Because every exhibition needs organising principles, the pictures, and so the accompanying information captions, are divided into themes, being:

• Agriculture
• Extraction
• Manufacturing and infrastructure
• Waste

The facts described in the picture captions are often mind-boggling. For example, there’s a photo of a vast array of plastic greenhouses in Ziway, Ethiopia, which covers an enormous 450 hectares in total. Up to 4 million roses are cut and shipped each day from here, almost all destined for the European market, where unknowing consumers buy bunches of Ethiopian-grown roses for their impressionable partners, both heedless of the enormous environmental cost behind every one of them.

Or take the wall label introducing the gallery devoted to Agriculture. This tells us that there are over 8 billion people on the planet and we all need to eat, preferably several meals a day. Approximately 75% of the global population eats meat, which corresponds to roughly 23 billion animals kept as livestock. Adding up all the people, livestock and, of course, pets, global agriculture must feed over 31 billion hungry creatures every day.

Creating enough agricultural land to cater to this vast, relentless need is the cause of endless environmental catastrophe:

• mass cutting down of ancient forests
• devastation of biodiversity
• depletion of one-off resources such as aquifers
• leaching of toxic pesticides and fertilisers into the water supplies
• constant emission of greenhouse gases at every step of production, processing and transport

Abstraction

So far, so environmentalist. But there’s another whole layer to the exhibition and to Burtynsky’s practice, which is indicated in the exhibition title (Extraction/Abstraction) and underpins much of his work. This is that, from the early days of his career he came to realise that large-scale photographs of landscapes, taken from high vantage points like mountains or from helicopters or drones, often look very like the abstract art produced by the various movements of abstract art in the twentieth century, from Paul Klee teaching at the Bauhaus in the 1920s to Jackson Pollock getting drunk in New Jersey in the 1950s.

Installation view of ‘Burtynsky: Extraction/Abstraction’ showing two works which look like mid-20th century abstract paintings but are in fact 21st century aerial photos of the Texas panhandle. Photo by the author

The curators have some characteristically clear and intelligent things to say about this:

Abstract art emerged in the early twentieth century as a radical break with the old ways of making pictures. Rather than depicting recognisable figures, objects or landscapes, abstract painting explores form, texture and colour for their own sakes.

Over the same period industrial agriculture, mass production, surface mining and the internal combustion engine also emerged, changing our way of life forever. Today technology is rapidly propelling us into the future in every sector…

While modern artists invented new expressive and emotional languages, modern engineers, technicians and industrialists were developing a new reality, divorced from the ancient ways of being, alien to the natural world and wholly unsustainable.

Among the appealing elements of Burtynsky’s thrilling photos is his invocation of and toying with the conventions of abstract art. Many of his photos can be appreciated for their abstract beauty first, before we delve further into the ruined landscapes and human toil which lies behind them.

And it’s true. Look at the photos I’ve included so far in this review and you can see how the vivid, colourful landscapes often approach or fully appear as abstract designs. To be honest, this turns out to be more true of the first floor of works, less true of the second floor which depicts more ‘realistic’ scenes, such as vast waste mountains in Nigeria, the world’s biggest dump of used tyres in America, dehumanisingly vast factories in China and Bangladesh, and so on.

So this abstract aspect is not to be found in all of his works, but the abstract qualities which are to the fore in the early rooms continue to haunt the later, more realistic works, appearing round their edges so to speak, hinting at the deeper, unexpressed patterns and subtle regularities which emerge from the chaos of human activity.

Oil Bunkering #9, Niger Delta, Nigeria (2016) Photo © Edward Burtynsky. Courtesy Flowers Gallery, London

‘In the Wake of Progress’

In between the two floors of big stunning photographs, on a mezzanine floor, is a large room which has been blacked out in order to host what the curators call an augmented reality (AR) experience but you and I might think of as an old-fashioned film, the gimmick being that it is divided into three separate screens alongside each other, sometimes depicting the same subject, sometimes showing different angles of the same thing, sometimes changing and moving on before the other two screens can catch up, a dynamic triptych. It is a musical and rhythmic way of presenting moving images.

Installation view of ‘In the Wake of Progress’ showing on three screens at ‘Burtynsky: Extraction/Abstraction’ showing the viewing room for ‘In the Wake of Progress’. Photo © Justin Piperger (2024) Image courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery, London

The film is titled ‘In the Wake of Progress’ and, as the name suggests, shows the vast wake of destruction and dehumanisation left by the unstoppable exploitation of the planet’s natural resources. Unusually for me, I sat and watched the entire half-hour thing through in its entirety. It is an absolutely stunning, commentary-free, wordless series of beautifully shot sequences depicting the same kinds of scenes we’ve seen in the photos, devastation, waste and pollution everywhere.

It starts with four or five minutes of a static shot in an unspoiled northern forest (as captured in the photo above), all moss-covered trees and hovering insects, calming the viewer and lulling us into a false sense of security (it was actually shot in a place called Avatar Grove on Vancouver island, British Columbia, Canada).

But then the destruction commences, with shots of forests much like this being logged and reduced to muddy bare hillsides; vast numbers of logs being floated downriver to huge lumber yards; and on to open cast mining; dynamiting rocks in quarries; oil spills rainbowing rivers; vast dumps of rusting oil cans, plastic phones, used tyres; terrifyingly huge inhuman factories; oil production; vast megacities criss-crossed by urban freeways choked with traffic – a bombardment of images of human destructiveness.

The promotional material makes much of the fact that the film and music were created with the help of ‘legendary’ Canadian music producer Bob Ezrin. I thought this phrasing was a tad counter-productive and made it sound like a self-congratulatory speech at the Oscars (‘And now ladies and gentleman,  the one and only, the legendary music producer, Boooob Ezrin!‘). The wall label also explains that the haunting wordless vocals which thread through the soundtrack are by ‘award-winning Cree Métis artist iskwē’, which is interesting enough, I suppose.

But the single most obvious thing about ‘In the Wake of Progress’ is how very similar it is, in visual themes and in even the repetitive, arpeggio-heavy soundtrack, to the great 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi, by ‘legendary’ director Godfrey Reggio, with music by ‘legendary’ minimalist composer Philip Glass. All it needed was the slow-motion sequence of Las Vegas casino workers and it would have become virtually the same film.

My point is nothing about plagiarism or anything like that, in fact I have two points. 1) What the similarity of both films suggest is that if you set off with the aim of depicting mankind’s destruction of the natural world, you’re going to end up shooting the same kinds of sequences (open cast mining, oil production, hyper-highways in mega-cities) i.e. there will be an inevitable sameyness about films like this because they are covering the same subject.

Secondly 2) the two films were produced and released exactly forty years apart (1982, 2022). Me and my like-minded liberal friends were obsessed with Koyaanisqatsi – I went to see it in the cinema at least five times when it came out. Being young, we thought immensely powerful cultural products like this would change the world and bring its rulers to their senses. Now, being old, I know that’s never going to happen. Films like this are nice to look at, trigger strong emotions, and change absolutely nothing.

Burtynsky the technological innovator

For photography buffs there’s a section of the show devoted to listing and explaining Burtynsky’s technical innovations. It turns out that he has not only adapted to the huge changes which have taken place in the technical side of photography over the past 40 years (the arrival of digital technology revolutionising everything) but has often been at the forefront of that innovation – working with the technical teams who accompany him on his projects to develop engineering and design solutions to the challenges of creating such huge photos, often taken from a great height.

This latter fact (height) explains the presence of not one but several drones in the display case, along with interesting explanations of how his engineers have changed and adapted them to fly stably and horizontally, while carrying ever-more powerful digital cameras.

Installation view of ‘Burtynsky: Extraction/Abstraction’ showing the display case of cameras and drones used by Burtynsky over the years. Photo © Justin Piperger (2024) Image courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery, London

In the photo above, on the wall on the right you can see a timeline of Burtynsky’s projects, starting with the earliest while he was still at Ryerson Polytechnic (1979 to 1981) and then listing each of his major projects and publications, year by year, with a paragraph or so detailing what technical innovations he brought to each of them.

• List of projects on Burtynsky’s website
• List of books on Burtynsky’s website

Self overcoming

Years ago I read half a dozen books by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. I wouldn’t pretend to be any kind of expert but my understanding is that a fundamental principle of Nietzsche’s philosophy is the notion of ‘self overcoming’. It’s the idea that in order to become who you want to be, you first need to overcome who you are. In order to realise your full potential, you must consciously conquer the aspects of your character and mind which limit and hold you back.

So far, so much like a Californian self-help video. Where Nietzsche pushes on is in holding the view that most of us are held back from a full understanding of the world we live in by a whole network of conventional thinking, commonplace morality, sentimental attitudes, wishful thinking, moral cowardice and intellectual weakness. In a thousand ways we hide from the truth of who we are and what we are doing.

Nietzsche said we should face the truth about ourselves and embrace it no matter how negative and destructive it may appear. Only by embracing the totality of our real natures can we live in truth.

Well, OK, then. All the facts indicate that we are destroying the planet, wrecking every ecosystem we’ve ever encountered and exterminating our fellow life forms at an unprecedented rate – and, following Nietzsche, I think we should embrace the fact. We should fully admit to being world killers and planet destroyers. We should own it and admit to being the nature-hating, species-exterminating, habitat-trashing creatures that all the evidence suggests we are.

In my opinion most people, especially in the pampered West, live in complete denial about what monsters the human race are – as my recent reviews of modern African or Middle Eastern history show time and time again, or the situation in Ukraine or Gaza demonstrate beyond dispute – we are planet-destroying locusts but locusts with machine guns and nukes, committed to the devastation of the planet and the mass killing of our own species.

I would rather it isn’t so, but it is so and any attempt to deal with the situation must start by acknowledging this truth. This position explains why, for me, the only weak point in the exhibition was where Burtynsky, disappointingly, joined in with the chorus of trite truisms, the sentimental bromides, and the wilful optimism of the wishy-washy liberal who still has hope:

‘I have spent over 40 years bearing witness to how modern civilization has dramatically transformed our planet. At this time, the awareness of these issues presented by my large format images has never felt more urgent… I hope the exhibition experience will continue to provide inflection points for diverse conversations on these issues and move us all to a place of positive action.’

‘Diverse conversations’ – does he really think ‘diverse conversations’, at dinner parties, down the pub or on social media, even at high-level gatherings like the COP conferences, are going to make a blind bit of difference to anything, because they absolutely aren’t and it’s disappointing that an artist who’s made such original art out of the disaster, still holds such weakly conventional opinions about it.

‘Add your thoughts to the conversation’

In the spirit of sentimental optimism which I’ve just explained why I despise, the exhibition contains two big blackboards with cups of white chalk sticks, and encourages us to write uplifting messages on the boards and ‘add your thoughts to the conversation’. Examples included: ‘Turn your phone off now’, ‘It’s easy to be green,’ ‘Be nice to the environment’ and other such gift card slogans. True to my blunt Nietzschean approach, I wrote ‘Exterminate all the brutes’.

To anybody who doesn’t get the reference, these are the words scrawled at the end of the high-minded missionary pamphlet written by the deranged colonial ivory agent, Kurtz, in Joseph Conrad’s novella ‘Heart of Darkness’. I wrote it in a spirit of Swiftian satire, for in the novel Kurtz has been driven completely mad by the sub-human savagery he encountered in the heart of the Congo, which he has assimilated and then taken to a whole new level of nihilistic destructiveness. He started out with the highest aims of bringing ‘civilisation’ to the heart of Africa and ended up with a mad vision of killing every one of the local people.

Everything I’ve read about the Congo backs up Kurtz’s feelings about the human race. If in any doubt you should make a study the Rwanda genocide and its aftermath in the two Congo wars and the Great War of Africa, which, even after the loss of up to 5 million lives, in eastern Congo lingers on to this day. And what lay behind this series of disasters? Greed to rape Congo of its natural resources.

First it was white Europeans enslaving, mutilating and massacring Africans in order to extract Congo’s vast rubber production; but then it was Africans looting, impoverishing, massacring and murdering each other in order to loot Congo’s other, mineral, resources. The colours of the skin and the names of the rulers (Leopold, Lumumba, Mobutu, Kabila), the ideologies they used to justify themselves (Christianity, communism, pan-Africanism, capitalism), all changed with the passing decades, but one constant remained the same: the murderous, nature-killing intensity of human greed. Vast wars were fought, immense human suffering caused, and large areas of the country ravaged by man’s endless quest for the blood diamonds, copper, gold and the rare metals which the world needs to carry on its course of untrammeled consumption.

• How conflict minerals make it into our phones

Which is why bromides like ‘Save Earth, Save Life!’, ‘Protect Our Planet, Preserve Our Future’ and ‘There is no planet B’ seem to me wholly inadequate to capture the brutal truth of the world we live in, the terrible violence man deals out to man every day (and worse to unprotected women and children), the appalling misery endured by the slaves who produce the components of our luxury goods, the daily murder of tens of millions of dumb animals so we can eat them, and the relentless degradation of every ecosystem on the planet.

Hence the saeva indignatio of my crayoned comment, scrawled across the blackboard in the same way that Kurtz, driven mad by seeing into the complete darkness of the human heart, ended his utopian pamphlet with the most nihilistic comment he could conceive of – ‘Exterminate all the brutes’ – a comment less on the natives of Congo than on the shallow, inadequate Christian ‘civilisation’ he was meant to be representing.

(The phrase saeva indignatio popped into my memory at this point and prompted me to look it up. It is Latin for ‘savage indignation’ and is a phrase used in the Latin epitaph of the great 18th century satirist Jonathan Swift, to denote his ‘intense feeling of contemptuous anger at human folly’.

• Jonathan Swift’s epitaph

So that’s what I wrote on the blackboard of this powerful, terrifying exhibition, and why – the last words of a deranged idealist, quoted to express my ‘intense feeling of contemptuous anger at human folly’.)

The merch irony

A last point about those exhibition blackboards: the way children, or those with a childlike understanding of the world, had covered them with infant-school slogans like ‘End consumerism’ and ‘Just stop buying stuff’ meant I couldn’t help laughing out loud when this breath-taking exhibition shunted me out, at the end, into the huge, clean and well-stocked Saatchi Gallery shop, a big room overflowing with classy merchandise and shiny products.

Here, as at all art exhibitions, you can find a range of posters and postcards and bags and books relating to the exhibition, which all lead up to a collectable box set of stylishly produced Burtynksy books and memorabilia. This will set back the well-heeled art fan a tidy £15,000.

As I reeled from the cognitive dissonance between everything I’d just been seeing and reading, between all those high-minded ‘green’ sentiments on the blackboards, and this riot of unashamed consumerism – a posh couple sauntered by and stopped at the pile of exhibition catalogues (a snip at £38). ‘Oh my God,’ gushed the young lady, flicking through the pictures of ruination made beautiful, ‘this would make such a fabulous coffee table book!’

And there, in a nutshell, you have it. Middle-class people queuing up to buy postcards, t-shirts, tote bags, fridge magnets, mobiles, videos and earnest books all advocating the end of the consumerism. Swift would be looking on, nodding and chuckling.

Thoughts

This is an awesome, amazing, must-see exhibition for at least four reasons:

1) Every single photo is a masterpiece. Each one of them is breath-takingly beautiful.

2) Each photo is accompanied by short but hugely informative wall captions which are all fascinating in their own right but also build up into an astonishingly encyclopedic overview of all types of human activity around the planet – hugely interesting and mercifully devoid of the moralistic hectoring you are subjected to at so many other exhibitions.

3) It is about the most important subject on earth, which is the way we humans are destroying it.

4) Unlike most art films, ‘In the Wake of Progress’, is a powerful, thrilling, devastating, hopeless, exhilarating watch.

I emerged reeling. I wanted to shake someone’s hand for organising such an overwhelming experience and bow down before Burtynsky’s awesome genius. ‘Extraction/Abstraction’ is quite brilliant.

Our hero at work on location in Belridge, California, site of hundreds of small oil wells (2003) Photo by Noah Weinzweig, courtesy of the Studio of Edward Burtynsky

Related links

• Extraction/Abstraction by Edward Burtynsky continues at the Saatchi Gallery until 6 May 2024
• Edward Burtynsky’s website

Environment-related reviews

Exhibitions

• Eco-Visionaries: confronting a planet in a state of emergency @ the Royal Academy (January 2020)
• Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis @ the Hayward Gallery (July 2023)
• RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology @ the Barbican (October 2023)
• A World In Common: Contemporary African Photography @ Tate Modern (November 2023) [in the last section, with its photos of rubbish dumps and environmental collapse]
• Wilfred Ukpong: Niger-Delta/Future-Cosmos @ Autograph ABP (March 2024)

Books

• The Diversity of Life by E.O. Wilson (1992)
• The Sixth Extinction by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin (1995)
• The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)