Edward Burtynsky’s Landscapes of Ruin and Inspiration

TeaHe is a Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has made a career out of documenting what he calls “changed landscapes” – entangled highway overpasses, giant oil refineries, mountains troubled by human exploitation. In 1999, he visited a tire-disposal site outside Modesto, California. It was surreal, he told me, almost transcendent. He felt as if he had entered a completely synthetic world: millions of tires stretched nearly five stories in the air, rubber fences stretching to the horizon.

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A few months later, a tire pile was struck by lightning and burst into flames. The fire burned up to 2,000 degrees and the sky was filled with thick black smoke. After a month, it was finally extinguished, but the tires had melted creating more than 250,000 gallons of melted oil, which threatened to seep into the soil and local water supply. Despite their unlikely beauty, Burtynsky’s altered landscapes always serve as a warning.

But since 2012, Burtynsky has tried to devote time each year to photographing “ancient landscapes”, capturing images of nature that inspire something more like hope. Earlier this year, he visited Shark Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site located at the far-western point of Australia. The bay is famous for the stromatolites scattered along its shores, layered rock formations formed by microorganisms over thousands of years, which grow, die and calcify with the sediment into marine mushroom caps. Stromatolites are considered to be the oldest known fossils on the planet, a living record; Some people in Shark Bay may have seen a time before man invented the tire or the wheel. Burtynsky observed the stromatolites and the rest of Shark Bay’s coastline only from the air, moving his camera out the passenger window of his Cessna 210. He left the land untouched.

This article appears in December 2025 Print edition titled “Wheels Up”.