Wheels Up

"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."

Edward Burtynsky photographs large-scale human-altered environments and occasional pristine natural places. He captured a Modesto tire-disposal site where millions of tires formed five-story stacks and rubber hedgerows. A lightning strike months later ignited a blaze that burned up to 2,000 degrees, producing thick black smoke and melting tires into over 250,000 gallons of molten oil that threatened soil and water. Since 2012, he has reserved yearly time to photograph pristine landscapes to evoke hope. He traveled to Shark Bay, viewed stromatolites from the air, and left the ground untouched to document ancient biological formations and coastline.

Read at The Atlantic