China, from world’s factory to builder of African industry, in dramatic photographs

Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky was 11 years old when he saw a newspaper advert for cameras and dark room equipment. “The seller was just three blocks away, so my dad said ‘Let’s take a look’,” Burtynsky, now 70, recalls. “There were enlargers, lenses, three Minolta cameras and bulk loaders and cassettes and two 100ft (30 metre) rolls of film as well as all the chemicals and trays needed for a dark room.” His father handed over C$25 for the lot, and the young Burtynsky got busy on his first assignment: photographing his much-loved dog, Tippy. “What I learned from my very first roll of film was that it is important to take more than one photo, and move around a bit, be fluid,” says Burtynsky, who became fascinated with how the three dimensional translated into two dimensions. Today he is one of the world’s most accomplished photographers, with a body of work spanning more than 40 years that is focused on humanity’s impact on the planet. I’m bearing witness, in some ways, to show you the scale of the march of globalisation Edward Burtynsky Burtynsky’s photographs can be found in the collections of more than 80 major museums, including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York; London’s Tate Modern; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Much of his work comprises large-scale aerial photographs that expose the sublime and often surreal qualities of human-altered landscapes and the global impact of consumerism. China has been a focus of his work given the country’s rapid industrialisation. He has visited the country 15 times. “I’ve been documenting China’s industrialisation since 1983, a large part of that focused on the controversial Three Gorges Dam, which displaced millions,” he says. Now that China has evolved into a major exporter of industrial know-how and infrastructure investments, Burtynsky has been following the trail of its influence. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Flowers Gallery (@flowersgallery) His latest exhibition, called “China in Africa”, has just opened at Hong Kong’s Flowers Gallery. The exhibition explores China’s impact on manufacturing, from the growth of its domestic production to its industrial footprint in Africa. Shot between 2018 and late 2024, his photographs – including aerial shots and others taken using a wide-angle lens – reflect Burtynsky’s interest in energy, extractive and transport infrastructure, seen in his 2005 book China. They show the rapid spread of such infrastructure in China and abroad. Images of automated plants and of battery mega-factories in China such as carmaker BYD’s in Jiangsu province contrast with those of labour-intensive factories and warehouses in Africa that mark a new chapter in the story of globalised Chinese production. Burtynsky is familiar with the human impact of industry. He was born in St Catherines in Ontario, a blue-collar town where US car giant General Motors was the biggest employer. His parents emigrated there from Ukraine in the late 1940s. His father, an aspiring artist who taught Burtynsky how to paint portraits and landscapes and operate a camera worked in the car factory. “My father came from a mountain village in Ukraine where people were creative – they painted and did woodwork and made things from the wool of the sheep they raised.” For his father, that lifestyle ended when, during the second world war, he was sent to Germany to work on a farm. “In his heart my father wanted to be an artist, so I got to live his life because he died young, at 45, from PCB poisoning,” says Burtynsky, referring to polychlorinated biphenyls, highly toxic and carcinogenic man-made chemicals that have been banned in Canada since 1977. “All the men who worked on his factory line died from PCB poisoning,” he adds. It was a life the young Burtynsky wished to avoid. “I didn’t want to work in a factory all my life – I wanted a job where I got to see the world,” he says. He saw a camera as a passport to that, and a chance to pursue his passion. Burtynsky was about 12 when he began taking photos at events attended by members of the Ukrainian community who had settled in his town after the war. “I was called ‘the kid with the camera’ and had my own wall in the town hall where I hung pictures to sell,” he recalls. Determined to follow his creative instincts, he studied photography at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University), where his focus was not purely on photography. “I loved philosophy, and the history of art, photography, painting, music,” he says. His photography has been influenced by artists such as Paul Klee, Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollock. “Last week I was in Shark Bay in Western Australia photographing sandbars and the tonality and colours and the craziness from the air looked just like a work by Salvador Dali.” Filmmaking is part of his repertoire too. In 2006 he released Manufactured Landscapes, a documentary about China’s industrial revolution for which he turned his lens on the factories, waste dumps, slag heaps and other by-products of the “Made in China” label. He also worked on the 2018 documentary Anthropocene, which took him to 20 countries in six continents to gather evidence of man’s impact on the planet – the subject of his first photographic assignment as a student. “It gave me a kind of ‘hall pass’ for acting like an alien from another planet who has been asked to show what the human species is doing on Earth,” he says. In a way, Burtynsky is still carrying out that assignment as he criss-crosses the world photographing toxic lakes, hills stripped bare by drought and landscapes scarred by mines. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Edward Burtynsky (@edwardburtynsky) What strikes the viewer most about his photos is not just their eye-popping scale but their crispness and clarity, best seen in “BYD Manufacturing Facility #2” that was taken in 2023 at the Build Your Dreams car factory in China’s Jiangsu province. “It is one of the most automated car factories in the world and I was fortunate to get access to it. I love the structure of the space … the white lighting – it looks like a cathedral.” An image from Namibia shows a Chinese-owned gravel quarry, gravel being a component of cement. Another picture shows women working in a Chinese-owned textile factory in Ethiopia. “In the part of Ethiopia I visited, China has built 54 sheds, along with all the infrastructure, the roads, the plumbing, the lighting. “The small sheds were 750,000 square feet (70,000 square metres), and the big ones one and a half million square feet, and just to give you perspective, they built all of this in one year – 40 million square feet of factory space.” Burtynsky’s photos of mega-factories built by Chinese companies in African landscapes – and the workers that operate them – evoke a mix of emotions: they are powerful and beautiful but also slightly unsettling. How you interpret them is up to you, he says. “I’m going into places that you wouldn’t go to and I’m bearing witness, in some ways, to show you the scale of the march of globalisation … I’m implicit, not explicit.” China in Africa, Flowers Gallery, 49 Tung St, Sheung Wan. Tel: 2576 5088. Ends July 12

China, from world’s factory to builder of African industry, in dramatic photographs

Humanity’s impact on the planet has been Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky’s focus for more than 40 years, as seen in a Hong Kong exhibition