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Newsletter - Spring 1999
Acquisitions

Photographing the Environment

Imagine 25,000 acres of lunar landscape filled with black rocks that look like lava. That is Sudbury, Ontario, site of the richest nickel deposit in the western world and subject of Ed Burtynsky's photograph Tailings #30. Modern reclamation efforts only partly mask the devastation caused by decades of intensive mining in Sudbury.

Sudbury's natural riches resulted from two geological actions. A meteor hit the region two million years ago, leaving a 17- by 37-mile depression called the Sudbury basin 40 miles north of Lake Huron. The meteor's impact forced molten, mineral-bearing rock toward the surface around the edges of the basin. Then glaciers came, cutting and shaping the area further. Nickel mining began in the late 19th century. For decades rock was burned in open cribs, releasing sulfur in dark clouds that rained down sulfuric acid, turning the already rocky terrain black. Since the 1970's, scrubbers and tall smokestacks have reduced the concentration of acid rain. Mining companies also now plant tree seedlings and grass on part of the land.

In Tailings #30 Burtynsky shows one stage of the nickel mining process, when the ore-bearing rock is broken down in a mill. Huge rotating cylinders grind the stone to a fine silt. Nickel and other metals are separated out; iron, not considered worth removing, remains. The silt is then mixed with water, and poured into great basins, or "tailing" ponds (tailings are the left-over, the waste). The water seeps out, leaving the rock dust that has turned red through oxidation of the iron that remains in the silt.

To take this photograph Burtynsky stood 15 or 20 feet above the tailings on one of the roads that traverse the pond. The red river of rust flows toward the viewer and spreads out in a wide delta. Since large pipes loop around the pond, releasing the watery silt at various intervals, more rivers form in different places. Tailings #30 represents only one small section of the vast 6000-acre tailing pond. Other photographs in his series show other sections and views. What Burtynsky captures in the tailings series is an ongoing process. For him, it is important that the pond constantly changes as new layers of tailings pour in and bulldozers build berms and roads.

Burtynsky's image is arresting visually-a mural-sized image, dramatically black and orange-red in color. The photograph's large scale creates you-are-there immediacy and encourages seemingly infinite detail. The scene is hauntingly beautiful as the river of tailings twists and turns, thins and thickens, in an almost abstract pattern. But it is a shock to realize what these forms actually represent. That recognition of beauty in ugliness is one of the "contradictions" that Burtynsky strives to express, what he also calls "the dynamic of attraction/repulsion." Yet he does not manipulate his photographs-the intense colors in Tailings #30 really look like that. Instead he seeks out perspective shifts and evocative patterns, and he uses a very wide-angle lens for a feeling of all-encompassing breadth.

A Toronto native who once worked as a miner, Burtynsky began photographing the industrial landscape over 20 years ago. His approach is part politics, part documentary, and part poetry. He expresses one of the contradictions of modern life: we deplore the destruction of nature but we enjoy the end results. Nickel, for instance, is used in making our refrigerators, stoves, and automobiles. "I prefer to keep the ambiguity in it," he says. Ultimately Burtynsky advocates not a nostalgic return to nature but the responsible management of what we still have and an attendant recognition of the cost.

—Martha Hoppin, art historian