By Charlotte Metcalf
Country & Town House

Having seen Edward Burtynsky’s recent retrospective at the Saatchi Gallery, I am eager to meet him. When he arrives, he appears upbeat for someone who has spent much of his life creating images out of the catastrophically destructive impact of industrialisation.

From a distance many of his images look like huge, beautiful, expressionist paintings. Move closer and you see they are photographs, which appear to have been taken from miles up, showing landscapes decimated by humanity’s activity – logging, mining, quarrying, railways, rubbish dumping, ship-breaking, intensive agriculture, building. The beauty he finds in destruction comprises the central ambiguity at his work’s core, imbuing it with persuasive power that urges us to take the necessary drastic action to save our planet.

Read the interview here.