Since the early 1980s, Edward Burtynsky has been photographing industrial landscapes across the globe, documenting in remarkable detail the human imprint on the planet through terraforming, extraction, urbanisation and deforestation. For African Studies, premiering in New York simultaneously at Sundaram Tagore Gallery and Howard Greenberg Gallery, he focused on Sub-Saharan Africa, traveling to Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal, South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Madagascar and Tanzania between 2015 and 2020.
Burtynsky's interest in Africa was sparked 20 years ago while he was working on his landmark 2004 photographic project China, which explores the country's rapid globalisation and the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. The series, and subsequent award-winning documentary film by Jennifer Baichwal, Manufactured Landscapes (2006), chronicle China's transformation into the world's leading manufacturer and depository for its waste. Burtynsky witnessed firsthand the immense environmental—and by extension, human—cost of development, and he predicted Africa would be the next, and perhaps the last, region to undergo major industrial expansion.
Presented in large-format photographs, African Studies conveys the fragility of the natural world, bringing together images of lush, undisturbed landscapes and environments irretrievably altered by industry. The series was largely photographed from aerial perspectives, a viewpoint that distills the continent's diverse topography into graphic patterns and gradients of sumptuous color. The resulting effect seemingly transforms the marks of human infrastructure into painterly abstract compositions. In these images, as in all his work, Burtynsky skillfully integrates critical reporting with sublime visual aesthetics creating a harmonious balance between content and form.
With this project I hope to continue raising awareness about the cost of growing our civilisation without the necessary consideration for sustainable industrial practices and the dire need for implementing globally organised governmental initiatives and binding international legislations in order to protect present and future generations from what stands to be forever lost.
On the occasion of the gallery openings of Edward Burtynsky's African Studies, Burtynsky and his gallerists have committed 100% of the earnings from the first 39" x 52" print sold at each show — equalling CAD $100,000.00 — to LagosPhoto. They will work with LagosPhoto to establish a new program within the Festival dedicated to emerging and mid-career African artists who are focussing their lens on subjects of globalism, and the environmental, cultural and social impacts of the climate crisis on the Global South.
African Studies is the subject of a 208-page monograph of the same title newly published by Steidl (2023).
Acclaimed Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky chronicles the human impact on nature in his disarmingly beautiful images of industrial landscapes around the globe. Shot from up to 7,000 feet above, Burtynsky’s painterly, often abstract images bring the scale of environmental devastation into perspective. Burtynsky began photographing nature in the early 1980s. His early works were intimate explorations of Canada’s unspoiled landscapes. By the late 1980s, however, he turned away from the quickly disappearing natural terrain. He realized this was the world that we were losing not the one we were to inherit. Instead, he reflected on his own experience working in the mining and automobile industries. Gradually he began to investigate industrial incursions into land with arresting results.
Established in 2000 in New York City, Sundaram Tagore Gallery represents established and emerging artists from around the globe, specialising in work that is aesthetically and intellectually rigorous, infused with humanism and art historically significant. The gallery was founded with a mission to show that some of the best and most meaningful art was being created by artists deeply engaged in cross-cultural explorations. Our international roster of artists cross cultural and national boundaries, synthesising Western visual language with forms, techniques and philosophies from Asia, the Subcontinent and the Middle East. More than twenty years later, we continue to champion artists, particularly women and those from underrepresented cultures, whose work exemplifies our interconnectedness.
