photo(s) © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier, Toronto

photo(s) © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier, Toronto

Of all of the indus­tries that Ed Burtynsky has inves­tigated over the years (mining, quarrying, manufac­tur­ing, shipping, recycling), none is more important than that of oil. Operating by the strength of its own prod­uct as well as making all oth­ers pos­sible, the oil indus­try is the corner­stone of our society in more ways than we often consider. But as the exhaustion of the earth's oil reserves becomes a real pos­sibility, these images rep­resent a present and pos­sible future of the oil indus­try. Discovered in 1911, the Belridge oil fields shown in Oil Fields 9a & 9B, Belridge, California, with their orderly rows of pumps like predatory crea­tures, is esti­mated to still con­tain more than 500 million barrels of oil. By con­trast, the SOCAR oil fields, near Baku, Azerbaijan, are mostly abandoned, leav­ing behind a dev­astated, toxic landscape. As a move towards other energy sources becomes more and more nec­essary, what will hap­pen to the vast areas of the earth which have been transformed in order to supply us with all the oil we want?

Burtynsky intends his images to "search for a dia­logue between attraction and repul­sion, seduction and fear", while explor­ing the intricate connection between indus­try and nature. At a time when this relation­ship is increas­ingly scru­ti­n­ised, Burtynsky's images take us to places that we might not oth­er­wise see, their strange beauty forc­ing us to keep looking, and start think­ing.