Few photographs are as beautiful as those of Edward Burtynsky’s. The Canadian landscape photographer’s current 20-year retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Manufactured Landscapes, is an explosion of color: deep greens and oranges contrasted by blinding whites. The large colour prints, 60 in all, never fail to dazzle.

But unlike the self-consciously beautiful photographs of Ansel Adams, Burtynsky’s arresting collection elicit foreboding as much as wonder, for the photographs are of a contemporary concern: mined landscapes, uranium deposits, pitted quarries, garbage dumps, seaside wreckage. The photographs are as epic in subject as they are large in size, evoking grandness of a tragic kind.

It’s precisely in their unsettling duality that the photographs derive their creative energies: wowing us with their beauty, yet confronting us with depictions of human waste; demanding reviewing both from afar and up close in their details; masquerading as both art-object and documentary artefact. Great photographs, as any great art, elude easy interpretation, and Manufactured Landscapes does just that.

The Varsity spoke with Edward Burtynsky about finding and creating art from behind the lens.

How did you end up taking these kinds of landscapes?

Twenty years ago I started shooting large format negatives and I was always interested in the large print. I feel one of the things that happens in a larger print is you can kind of fall into it in a new way, explore the minute details with a greater intensity than with a small print. A large format camera gives you the ability to see the print for its larger size and go into it in a more analytical way, and often with the surprises of discovering the scale of the place. With the quarries, for instance, you can see the different eras and techniques that were used and surfacetry of those different technological eras.

So the large format camera offers the detail that gives viewers a way of entering the photograph in a way that you wanted to communicate.

I call that a secondary reading. The first one is when you get to see the photograph in its whole aspect. The second reading is to get in there and explore it six inches away and find things that you didn’t quite capture in the first viewing.

It’s fascinating you say that, because I had that exact experience with the photograph of the mountain range in Carrara, Italy. When I was looking at it from afar I thought, “Oh, it looks like Ansel Adams,” but at closer viewing it’s actually a charred landscape from the mining, which I thought was a different take on the photograph.

Yeah, that one is really a girth around the whole mountain. I actually thought of Ansel Adams, as a kind of tribute and update to the old guy…

So you were consciously tipping the hat to Adams?

Yeah, I was. That one shows the grandness of a mountain. The kind of great atmospheric light and view was something he really pursued, whether in Yosemite or his favorite spots. He was always trying to pull off the larger-than-life mythological aspect of the West Coast landscape. This seemed to have this mythic notion of mountain and yet it was part of the new layering I thought a contemporary artist could add. We are now in a position of a new kind of landscape that we’ve changed through industrial processes.

The works of Adams and Carleton Watkins that have influenced your work are of a nostalgic nature, more self-consciously beautiful. You say a new kind of contemporary landscape is now possible. What do you have in mind?

When I looked at all of the early landscaping, the reverence was for the land and nature and its sublime aspects. One thing I like to think about is that the earlier understanding of the sublime in art-Turner or the Romantics-they often saw the sublime as a force of nature, and it was a fearful sublime. That was an interesting period for art, but I felt that transcription had occurred. Very often we are now enclosed in a sheath around us and we fly over the storms in our jets and drive in our cars, and we sit in our homes, so we live in this buffer. But in the creating of that buffer, I believe a ‘new sublime’ has emerged, one in which the technology we have developed and the force and scale of that technology is the new seeing of awe and wonder-and that is our own doing. The new thing to fear in nature is man himself.

One of my favorite photographs shows a stream of deep orange mineral residue meandering through a charcoal-colored ground (image above). How did you find this place?

In 1985 I came across tailings. Tailings are the direct consequence of any mining activity: you take the oar out of the ground, you grind it to a fine sand, you take the minerals that you want, and you put the unwanted silt in tailings or ponds. I wanted to go in there and complete the idea of mining, that tailings are a direct consequence of mining and create landscapes and wastelands. They have a really surreal quality to them.

You tend to have an affinity for deep oranges and greens. Are you looking for specific colors that attract you?

When I got into color in 1980 I was always interested from the age of 11 to be an art photographer. I didn’t want to be portrait photographer, a reporter, a commercial photographer. From a very early age I fell in love with it and it was a natural tool for me. But I did black and white for my early years, then in 1980 I started shooting large format color negative film. I was very conscious of color and who was using color in the art world at that time: William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore. But in Canada I was one of the first ones to start using colour as an art medium. Even my teachers at the time were saying, “Oh, we just teach colour for commercial.” I set out as a pioneer to say colour, in photography, can be as artistic as black and white.

It’s interesting to hear you describe this in anthropological terms: Do you consider yourself a documentary photographer or an art-based photographer?

I’m kind of a hybrid of all kinds of things. It is a kind of modern-day anthropology and archaeology, in which I’m uncovering aspects of our civilization. But using art to channel these ideas through in a way of interpreting it. In documentary, its intention is often to be very factual, whereas the specific mine that I photograph or place, what’s important is that it’s that activity at that scale. Quite often my research takes me to the largest examples. I’m often drawn to that landscape, because what I find interesting is to focus on the largest examples of the “ages of man.” As a current day archaeologist, what do these ages look like?

Given the nature of your work, do you find these collections of human waste and destruction disturbing?

As time has gone on, I’ve become more and more concerned. The evidence is mounting that our activities are having a profound effect on our ecosystems. At the very beginning I just thought this was something people would find interesting and important. As an artist, one is always interested in leaving marks and what becomes important and lives on, something for people to see in the future as well as the present. This act of building a consumerist/capitalist society and the pressures it puts on the environment is the thing that may actually be the most difficult thing we have to solve as a species. There is a sense of urgency I’m beginning to feel and it makes the work more compelling to do and talk about.

You’re introducing a lot of ideas that go beyond the photograph. Is this what you’d like people leaving the exhibit to have, this kind of conversation of ideas?

I like the idea that the images have the potential to awaken that kind of curiosity of why someone would want to take these photographs, even though I’m not saying something that’s evident in the pictures. At the same time, it does point to these vast industrial complexes that we’ve created, and the dilemma we’re in raises a number of questions. I’m hoping that you’re drawn to the photographs, whether it’s the aesthetics or the colour or the light or the scene itself. There’s a visual attraction-you’re drawn to it, but you don’t know why. So that to me is the opening volley. But at the same time you go in, and you start to think, “Well, what am I looking at?”

Edward Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes is on exhibit now until April 4 at the AGO. For more info, see www.ago.net.