“I think the government’s role is to set a level playing field and set policies that begin to allow us to look toward alternatives. I wish the American politicians were able to do that as well, but there seems to be a lot of very powerful interest groups that are firmly planted around the powers that be that ensure that any kind of policies that interrupt the flow of oil seem to be loudly shouted down,” said Mr. Burtynsky, a native of St. Catharines, Ont.
Oil features more than 50 large-scale photographs that represent oil’s lifecycle, from extraction and refinement, use in modern life such as cars and highways, homes and industry, and “the end of oil.” Mr. Burtynsky was in Ottawa for the exhibit’s opening on May 31. He said the event was bittersweet.
“There was a good audience and people seemed to really enjoy it. It was in some way a little bit sad because this show opened in 2009 so it’s been four years and had four venues in Europe and eight venues in North America, and this is the last one, so it’s the end of the line,” he told The Hill Times recently. “It’s the last one. There’s a new one emerging on water, but it was kind of a saying goodbye to the Oil show.”
This Q&A has been edited for length and style.
Why did you want to focus on the oil industry?
“It underpinned a lot of the kind of ideas I was looking at in my other work in mining and quarries and looking at industries of vast scale and looking at what the driving force for that scale was and recognizing the important role that the internal combustion engine and a cheap source of fuel through this thing called oil allowed for this kind of industrial expansion to occur at this scale. … When I started to think about it, it started to explain to me how we ended up adding almost a billion people every decade from when I was born. What’s driving that growth?
“To me, it was the energy envelope that’s allowing us to expand our numbers at that scale. If there was still conventional farming, I think a couple working on the farm can provide enough calories for themselves and I think two others but now we have these combines and big machinery on farms that one guy could do the work of thousands in a day and that’s driven the population growth and it’s also driven the middle class. The middle class is a direct result of internal combustion engine and the automobile and the making of it and the roadways and the bridges and the 20th century evolution of the car has really provided so much employment and so much money, then the travel industry and motels and hotels, and all of that. That, to me, was a central key ingredient to an affluent middle class to emerge.”
What do the different themes of Extraction and Refinement, Transportation and Motor Culture, and The End of Oil mean to you?
“They kind of helped me position the pictures and how each picture fits into a larger puzzle. When one looks at that, it’s hard not to be concerned about the positive and negative sides. On the positive side, there’s a lot of employment created by this industry. We all have mobility, we all like our mobility, we all use oil every day of our lives, every hour of our lives almost in some way and so we’re enjoying the benefits of this energy source all the time, but we also know that on the other side of it, it’s a finite resource. It’s going to get harder and harder to get it in an easy and practical and non-polluting way. I think the oil sands would be the less practical and dirtier way of getting oil, but we’re being forced into these places trying to supply the growing demand that’s out there for oil. …
“We’ve got a problem in terms of our voracious appetite for more and more energy and populations continuing to grow and nothing readily available that could easily replace that level of energy production. So we’ve a got a problem, a double-edged sword. On one side, societies would quickly crumble and go into chaos if all of a sudden oil was made scarce.
“On the other side is that as we burn more of it, we’re putting more into the atmosphere creating problems that may be very difficult to solve if they can be solved at all in the future if we go past a certain level. We’re already at 400 parts per million and that’s way beyond anything that’s happened in the last, I think couple hundred thousand years.”
What do you want people to take away from the exhibit?
“I think I’d like them to think about this commodity and how dependent we are on it, how vulnerable we are to it, how we lack any resilience if anything happens to that product. We’ve built a total dependence to it. I don’t know how much people think about that dependency and all the consequences. …
“Individually, it doesn’t seem like I’m doing anything too badly, but add the billions of people that are here, and your individual actions are now multiplied by millions upon millions of people and now it’s not okay [because] the Earth can’t absorb that anymore and you’re affecting all life on the planet, the seas, the oceans, acidity, climate, temperatures, plants, life cycles on Earth.”
What’s your favourite photo in the exhibit?
“There are quite a few that I quite like. The ship-breaking work, the stuff in Bangladesh was pretty powerful. It was almost like film sets. It was very surreal. It was one of those things where I was shooting it going, ‘Gosh, I wonder if I’m ever going to be able to find this kind of subject matter again in my career.’ There are a few from that series. There’s one of a guy standing inside an oil tanker, and it’s very poignant I think. You can see the blue, black kind of inner coating of the cut oil tanker on the beach. I like that one a lot.”
What was the most interesting thing you found doing this?
“I got to explore all kinds of different cultures. I got to go to refineries, and found oil fields and where they are, so the interesting thing for me was at the end of it, I really had a better idea of oil, where it comes from and the process. I didn’t become an expert, but I certainly gathered a lot of knowledge about that thing I’m photographing, which I always find a happy reward for pursuing an idea.”
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com
Author: Bea Vongdouangchanh
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