In 2009, Swiss photographers Mathias Braschler and Monika Fischer set out to document the people suffering the first shocks of the climate crisis. They had just returned from China, where rapid, unregulated development has ravaged the natural landscapes. Back home, though, the debate still felt strangely theoretical. In 2009, you still had people who denied climate change, Braschler recalls. People said, This is media hype.'
The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has built a career documenting what he calls "altered landscapes"-tangled highway overpasses, sprawling oil refineries, mountainsides pockmarked by human exploitation. In 1999, he visited a tire-disposal site outside Modesto, California. It was surreal, he told me, almost sublime. He felt as if he had entered an entirely synthetic world: millions of tires stacked some five stories into the air, rubber hedgerows stretching to the horizon.
For over 40 years, Edward Burtynsky's photographs have used the privileges granted by perspective and access to chronicle the relentless effects human industry has on global society and the environment. Burtynsky's visual syntax provides more clarity than ever, transcending the limits of a screen to deliver scenes and immersive murals that provoke urgency and inspire a meticulous gauge of reality.