Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky takes us to corners of the world we could never see with our own eyes — places where the wounds and scars we have inflicted as a species run deepest. Images that spark dialogues on the road to transition.

We are changing the world. Nothing new there. It is a statement whose roots stretch back to the dawn of humanity's relationship with the soil, the sea, the atmosphere and everything in between. Over the past few decades, however, this change has taken on global dimensions. What we need here, in the places where we live, has distant origins and produces profound transformations in the habitats of areas of the planet far removed from our gaze and our attention.

It is a fact, it is what is happening, it is the trajectory humanity has drawn: "Centuries ago, people knew where the stones used to build the walls of their cities came from, the wood for the roofs of their houses, the food they ate. There might have been some exotic products, certain spices, but otherwise the answer was clear to everyone. Today, we cannot answer that question: the fossil fuels we use to produce energy might come from the United States, Saudi Arabia or Azerbaijan. We simply don't know." This is how Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky describes the origins of his work, around the early 1980s: using photography to "reconnect us with the origins of the materials we use and link them to the industrial worlds that shape our habitat, our lives."

Centuries ago, people knew where the stones used to build the walls of their cities came from, the wood for the roofs of their houses, the food they ate.

Burtynsky is today among the most celebrated photographers in the world, thanks in large part to the way his work transforms photographic technique into both a method of inquiry and a narrative tool for drawing people into the story of humanity's transformation of the environment.

The photographs produce an experience that could not be replicated even by going there in person and seeing it with one's own eyes.

Burtynsky describes how the powerful effect his images have on viewers has much to do with his intuition to apply large-format photography — previously used mainly for advertising and commercial purposes — to the representation of industrial realities. Thanks to the scale of the prints, viewers first encounter a sweeping overview "in which everything appears sharp at once, and then begin to notice the details of the image, so that suddenly the small things within a large photograph acquire meaning." From the whole to the particular, like a long tracking shot that draws us closer toward the details where meanings otherwise out of reach lie hidden.

"It is a completely different way of seeing from how we can explore the real world," Burtynsky explains. "These photographs offer an immersive means of holding viewers' attention and drawing them into the places photographed. The result is an experience they could never truly have even if I took them there in person, to those mines or those quarries."

Looking at the photographs, Burtynsky's words spring to life — as happened at M9, the Museo del Novecento in Mestre, which dedicated to the Canadian photographer the most comprehensive retrospective of his entire career. These enormous photographs seduce through what they appear to be. A dance of grey petals clings to a stem which, on closer inspection, turns out to be a conveyor belt pouring kimberlite — waste material from diamond extraction — into a pond in Kimberley, South Africa. Set like fossil shells in rock, spirals striped in grey and red are forms sculpted by enormous machines excavating, 350 metres below the city of Berezniki in Russia, a three-thousand-kilometre tunnel for potassium extraction. Straight lines converge toward the centre of the image, tracing an irregular shape that only after reading the caption can be identified as a lithium extraction plant in the Atacama Desert in Chile.

Burtynsky is a photographer, an artist, "a dispenser of beauty," in the words of exhibition curator Marc Mayer. His images are, first and foremost, beautiful, and that beauty is the gateway to a question that concerns us all: in what ways have our lives transformed, and continue to transform, our habitat.

"I never manipulate my photographs," Burtynsky explains. "The viewer stands before real places and wonders how a place can look the way it does in the photograph, because it is so foreign to their eye. Taking viewers into distant worlds — into a quarry where enormous blocks of stone are cut away, or into the world's largest iron mines where trucks have tyres three metres tall and a load capacity of 400 tonnes — I believe that is an interesting way to convey the scale at which humanity is draining the planet's resources."

Lithium for batteries, potassium for agriculture, vast expanses of rapeseed, coal mines, and countless other installations scattered across the continents. The planet as told through Burtynsky's photographs reckons with the footprint of the human species — ecosystems wounded in their depths by an action that carries the feel of the everyday, the threat of normality, and perhaps for this very reason the photographer's narrative grows ever more dramatic as one ventures further into the details.

"I photograph situations that we have knowingly permitted. We have knowingly allowed companies to carry out those activities: we have allowed those trees to be felled, those mines to be dug, those minerals to be extracted in that way. We have allowed our systems to do these things on a large scale in order to build our cities, produce the energy we use, provide heating for billions of people — and if not for all of them, for as many as possible. The worlds visible in these photographs are intentional, in exactly the same way that the buildings we live and work in are intentional, the cars we drive, the world we inhabit. Our lives move within this polarity whereby the things we build are the consequence of destruction. Now, this creative-destructive act is being carried out on a vast scale. I am simply trying to show the other side of our lives. This photograph is an invitation to reflect; it is not trying to find answers to a problem — it is simply telling you that the problem exists."

A problem that projects us toward the future: if Burtynsky's photographs document the transformations we inflict upon the environment and ecosystems in order to live the lives we live, does there exist, today, a way to transform our industrial systems and our desire for wellbeing in a manner that is sustainable, lasting and equitably distributed? In an attempt to address this question, inspired by Burtynsky's images, Cmcc together with M9 – Museo del Novecento di Mestre, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia and Nice – Centre for the environmental humanities produced a series of dialogues involving scientists and researchers to explore three specific themes:

"Trasformazioni" is a series on the world we are changing — three episodes moderated by Cristina Nadotti with Enrica De Cian, Antonella Mazzone, Maria Vincenza Chiriacò, Daniele Brombal, Paola Mercogliano and Maria Chiara Pastore, available on the Cmcc YouTube channel, on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Amazon Music and on all podcast platforms.

Mauro Buonocore, the author of this interview, leads the communications and science outreach activities of Fondazione Cmcc – Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui cambiamenti climatici, the international research centre that studies the interaction between climate change and society.