Views of Earth from space

The in-article photos are of oddly low resolution but if you enlarge them they get much better.

The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is a master of the post-industrial sublime. His sweeping point of view is, at the very least, ambivalent. His shots, most recently taken from the coolest possible standpoint of a helicopter and sometimes a satellite, are at first sight surreal and glorious, but they have an ominous documentary undertow.

His large-format photos aestheticise mining, deforestation, industrial waste and decay, monumental piles of garbage, plastic, rubber; expanses of new and decommissioned equipment so vast that they look like crystalline formations; dense human settlements which from an Olympian standpoint look like creeping mould or infestations.

“Most people would walk by a dump pile and assume that there’s no picture there,” Burtynsky has said. “But there’s always a picture, you just have to go in there and find it.” One of his famous sequences depicts mountains of discarded tires in California. Another shows mountains of poached ivory being burnt. Waves of rock curve into an unsettling symmetry in his photo of Chuquicamata, one of the world’s largest open-pit mines. There is dark irony in his radically anti-idyllic view of the world.

“Scientists do a pretty terrible job of telling stories, whereas artists have the ability to take the world and make it accessible for everyone,” argues Burtynsky. According to his new book Anthropocene, it is estimated that it currently takes 60 billion tonnes of material annually (biomass, fossil energy carriers, metal ores, industrial and construction minerals) to feed humanity’s global metabolism. Burtynsky’s images offer a disturbing insight into how we’re consuming the Earth at an alarming rate – as well as giving a sense of the scale at which we’re dumping it back out, in giant heaps, streams, and lagoons.
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20181017-striking-photos-of-human-scars-on-earth