Bearing witness

To mark the opening of his new exhibition at Saatchi Gallery, London, Edward Burtynsky talks to Tracy Calder about fishing, photography, eco-anxiety and the benefits of being a perfectionist

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When Edward Burtynsky was a child, he grew up to the soundtrack of the General Motors plant in St Catharines, Ontario. 'We would drive past and all you could hear was ba-boom, ba-boom,' he recalls as we settle down for a chat. St Catharines was a blue-collar city and his father, Peter, had secured work on the production line at the factory.

'There was a red brick wall that ran for about half a kilometre and from behind it there came a noise so loud that you could feel the earth shake,' he explains. When Edward was seven, he attended an open day at the plant and was amazed by what he found there. 'I saw molten metal going down chutes, big presses in action and people wearing aluminium suits that made them look like Martians,' he laughs.

All the while, ba-boom, ba-boom rang out like a heartbeat. To a child born at the beginning of the Space Race, this odd environment where humans and technology worked side by side must have seemed intoxicating. 'I realised that there was this whole other world,' he says. 'It was like going into the bowels of the machine while knowing that every time we drove past, we were riding in the thing the plant was making!'