Recording human impact on the earth

PHOTOGRAPHING nature in all its natural glory has been done by greats such as Ansel Adams and other landscape photographers. So when Canadian Edward Burtynsky was looking for his angle, he picked Man's impact on the landscape instead. "It's focusing the lenses on human systems we've put into the landscape," he explains, adding that he knew he wanted to photograph nature, but he wished to do it with a difference. "Most of my work is to connect us, humans, to the landscape. That's the thesis."

It's easy now to see Burtynsky's photographs through the filters of environmentalism, but when he started 30 years ago, the view towards our land and nature was very different, he recalls. "The idea of global warming, that we could fish out our oceans, or run out of petrol, for instance, just wasn't part of the discussion."

Burtynsky began with mines - iron, silver, nickel - and the impact of mining activity on the landscape, such as railtracks in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, in the 1980s. From mines, he went on to photograph quarries in North America to Europe. Then it was oil refineries and oil fields, a trail which brought him to Asia where he photographed ship-breaking work in Bangladesh by early 2000. "That was the game-changer for me," he says, as the images he took of Bangladeshis breaking up old ships practically with their bare hands, and carrying all that steel on their shoulders, got him noticed. "I was probably the first artist to bring those images to the West."