Burtynsky had hired our helicopter for four hours, at a rate of two dollars per second, to document the ravages of oil theft in the estuaries along Nigeria’s southern coast. Since crude was discovered in Nigeria, in 1956, it has brought wealth and corruption, impoverishment and armed conflict—a global symbol of squandered possibility. “Wherever there is oil, especially in developing countries, by and large there is a lot of pilfering, and society doesn’t really enjoy the profits,” Burtynsky had told me. “In the Niger Delta, the pushback from the have-nots has been to go in there and start pirating the oil.” In recent years, parts of the delta have taken on the atmosphere of a war zone: hidden among mangroves and low bush, villagers and local militias have established countless makeshift distilleries to refine crude stolen from pipelines, while dumping tons of oleaginous waste back into the ground. The government has estimated that two hundred and fifty thousand barrels are stolen daily, but nobody really knows. Last year, Nigeria’s newly elected President, Muhammadu Buhari, vowed to end the theft, noting, “The amount involved is mind-boggling.” [...]
The helicopter descended to four hundred and fifty feet. “I always had this rule,” Burtynsky told me. “Shoot at no higher than seven hundred feet—eight hundred, max—because as soon as you go past that all the details become insignificant. The landscape starts becoming more pattern, less recognizable.” We were hovering over our first destination: a canal that Burtynsky had nicknamed Snoopy, for the shape of a large patch of oil in the water. The canal was lined with rows of homemade distilleries—rusted cube-shaped ovens that sprouted long pipes, some ending in runoff pools. Since Buhari came to office, a military task force had begun to crack down on the theft, and many sites were charred black from attacks. But a few, apparently rehabilitated, demonstrated activity: a faint plume, a nearby tent. Before takeoff, the pilot had warned Burtynsky that men on the ground might fire at the helicopter. If that happened, he said, he would take evasive maneuvers. [...]
Like Watkins, Burtynsky has built a reputation on ambitious projects that double as tests of stamina. “Oil,” a six-pound book published in 2009, contains a decade’s worth of work, exploring the effect of crude upon the earth. He started his most recent project, “Water,” in 2008, and it took five years, and travel to ten countries, to finish. Burtynsky shot mesmerizing vistas of mountain reservoirs, desiccated lakes, agriculture, and suburban sprawl. He also joined with the filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal to co-direct “Watermark,” a documentary that combines his stills from the series with cinematography. “I see myself as a filmmaker in training,” he told me. The storytelling in “Watermark” is low in exposition and high in visual splendor. In one shot, the frame is filled with the body of a worker; as the camera pulls back, we see that he is facing Xiluodu Dam, on the Yangtze River—one of the world’s tallest dams. Over the course of a minute, the shot subverts our sense of scale. As Burtynsky put it, “That thing just keeps getting bigger, and the guy is just diminishing and diminishing.” The scene ends in a terrifying panorama of engineering that reduces the sole visible person to insignificance.
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