Edward Burtynsky’s Landscapes of Ruin and Inspiration

The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has built a career documenting what he calls “altered landscapes”—tangled highway overpasses, sprawling oil refineries, mountainsides pockmarked by human exploitation. In 1999, he visited a tire-disposal site outside Modesto, California. It was surreal, he told me, almost sublime. He felt as if he had entered an entirely synthetic world: millions of tires stacked some five stories into the air, rubber hedgerows stretching to the horizon.

A few months later, the tire pile was struck by lightning and burst into flames. The fire burned as hot as 2,000 degrees and filled the sky with a thick black smoke. After a month, it was at last extinguished, but the tires had melted into more than 250,000 gallons of molten oil that risked seeping into the soil and local water supply. Despite their unlikely beauty, Burtynsky’s altered landscapes have always functioned in part as a warning.

But since 2012, Burtynsky has tried to dedicate time each year to photographing “pristine landscapes,” capturing images of nature that inspire something more like hope. Earlier this year, he traveled to Shark Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site at Australia’s farthest-western point. The bay is famous for the stromatolites studding its shore, layered rock structures formed over thousands of years by microorganisms that grow, die, and calcify with sediment into marine mushroom caps. Stromatolites are considered the oldest-known fossils on the planet, a living record; some in Shark Bay would have witnessed a time before humans invented the tire—or the wheel. Burtynsky viewed the stromatolites and the rest of Shark Bay’s coastline only from the air, angling his camera out of the passenger window of a Cessna 210. The ground, he left untouched.

This article appears in the December 2025 print edition with the headline “Wheels Up.”