Edward Burtynsky / African Studies

 

Edward Burtynsky

AFRICAN STUDIES

ARTIST STATEMENT

The 54 countries of Africa are divided physically through its center by the Sahara Desert and encompass a broad spectrum of governments and economies. This project, focussing on sub-Saharan Africa, has taken me to Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal, South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Madagascar and Tanzania but the complex and diverse nature of this vast continent cannot be defined neatly in a book of images. Over the past seven years, during the course of my observations across sub-Saharan Africa, the title African Studies came to mind, as it most appropriately reflects this experience.

 

PHOTOGRAPHY

Edward Burtynsky: ‘My photographs are like Rorschach tests’

The photographer’s images of environmental degradation are both stunning and haunting, and make up a captivating new survey

Veronica Esposito

Thu 26 Jun 2025 18.13 

Few if any photographers have done more than Edward Burtynsky to shape our view of the large-scale industrial production that is a constant, ever-expanding part of the capitalist system. Since the 1980s, he has created more than a dozen multiyear series, tackling extractive industries like mining and oil refining in India, China and Azerbaijan, traveling to such disparate places as Western Australia, Chile’s Atacama desert and the so-called ship graveyards of Bangladesh.

Justin Erickson / Ingleside on the Bay

Ingleside on the Bay

by JUSTIN ERICKSON

Photographs by Edward Burtynsky

I was walking back from the corner store, my Snickers bar melting in my hand quick as a popsicle, when I met a pirate. She pointed a clothes’ hanger hook at her eyepatch and said, “They call me the Pirate.” I asked her what her name was and she said, “Argh!” and I said, “But what’s your real name?” and she said, “Macy,” so that’s what I called her.

Macy had lost a game of “think fast!” and got hundreds of caterpillar hairs stuck in her eye, so when she showed up at school with a wad of gauze and tape covering it, everyone started calling her the Pirate. And now she was the Pirate. “Ahoy!” she would say, and “Avast ye!” always waving her hook, and sometimes clomping on a peg leg. Sometimes it was her right leg, sometimes her left.