CBC Newfoundland and Labrador

Alberta Oil Sands #1 Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, 2007

"It's the largest surface engineering project on the planet, so the oilsands aren't deep, but they're wide. And the area that is being affected is the size of Florida, so we're talking about reshaping, to exploit this whole resource, it means reshaping a whole province. It means at the end of the day, whatever it is 40, 50 years, Alberta will be unrecognizable. Nothing will have been left untouched to go after this resource. Which means that the water and the animals, all the constituents and the native Indians, the indigenous people who've been there are all going to be affected. You can't work on that scale, and not disrupt the fabric."

Alberta Oil Sands #2 Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, 2007

"So I found that even though I was never allowed to actually get on the ground in these locations, that wasn't the way to photograph it anyway. It was really from a helicopter that really told the story, so ultimately by doing that, and pushing me to a higher vantage point it was actually ... I thought, to my benefit as an imagemaker. That that was the place to actually take those pictures."

Alberta Oil Sands #6 Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, 2007

"I think that's the duality. I think that's what makes the images unstable. I think that's what makes them interesting that they're not kind of used as indictments ... Their meaning is not fixed and I think in most really interesting art which does touch upon political bends or whatever. Fixing the meaning then also takes that work and locates it directly in a particular time and so it really doesn't migrate very well into the future once that is considered no longer a threat or an issue, so dies the work."

Alberta Oil Sands #10 Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, 2007

"So I don't necessarily want to nail it to a political cause and that there is always ambiguity so that I've often said a lot of my work can either appear on an annual report of the corporation or it can also be a poster for Greenpeace. It can be either."

Alberta Oil Sands #9 Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, 2007

"I'm showing in Edmonton. I'm showing in St. John's. And either, I think, interesting places to have a discussion. I think that these places are dependent on these resources to be flowing, but yeah, at the same time should recognize that these are finite resources.

AMARC #5 Tucson, Arizona, USA, 2006

"Whereas travelling the world and looking at what's happening to China and look what's happening to India, and look what's happening to the whole of Asia. Even in Africa, they're all embracing the template that the western world has used: you bring in the automobile and mobility and the economies [that] the automobile brings and the road building. And that creates a middle class and that brings everybody out of poverty. So they are just following the exact same pattern that has worked for us, but as I often point out, they [joined] the party, kind of, at the last dance."

Bonneville #1 Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah, USA, 2008

"If you look at the base load of what we need to keep our world going between oil, coal and natural gas, we need an awful lot of solar panels and turbines to come anywhere near that kind of easy energy that we're kind of expending."

Densified Oil Drums #4 Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, 1997

"There's no right or wrong, we're in a complex web of issues. To get out of it is a complex web of issues that we're going to have to contend with as well. What, I think, is often missing is the political will to move ahead of these issues - that governments are very afraid to do that for loss of votes so they just wait until people scream and then they react."

Oil Fields #17 Taft, California, USA, 2002

"We need to understand that [we] are working within a time frame, and we don't have a lot of time left, and if my images can somehow help the discussion and the consciousness that needs to be raised before people start to look for politicians who are going to make the differences."

Oil Fields #19a Belridge, California, USA, 2003

"It's a mosquito drawing blood. It's like we have these pipes into the ground sucking it out and we never really get a chance to see very much of the material itself, but each one of us is almost using it every day."

Oil Fields #28 Cold Lake Alberta, Canada, 2001

"We've always taken from nature, but what's changed in the last century is the scale of our taking, and the speed of our taking. And I thought the large format camera was a wonderful tool to go out into that world and show the yin to the yang. This is what we have to do to have the life that we have here, and you can't have one without the other."

Oil Refineries #3 Oakville, Ontario, Canada, 1999

"In a free, open society, I think these kinds of images are interesting when they challenge because they open up dialogue - you could have people from both sides of the fence enter it, and discuss it from their point of view. Neither is completely wrong. If we said, 'So be it, we're going to shut it all down, no oil,' then what? I mean, do we really want that world? If we wanted to see the world fall around behind us quickly, just remove the oil and it will be a very different world, very quickly. And we won't be able to get food quick enough, and we won't be able to get anywhere. Bye bye vacation and bye bye so many jobs. So be careful what you wish for."

Oil Fields #22 Cold Lake, Alberta, Canada, 2001

"The oil itself is something that we don't see. It's kind of like the blood in our veins. If we do see it, it's usually a problem.The subject is what oil has created, whether the landscapes it has influenced like suburbs and highways and freeways and that sort of thing, and also the kind of industries, the auto industry and the airline industry are all are dependent on the fact that there's a good supply of of this material we call oil."

Recycling #10 Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2001

"Artists are often the ones within our society that hold the mirrors back. And not to say that I'm pure and I don't have a car, and I don't fly in planes, but at the same time I'm trying to raise my own consciousness and then extend that consciousness through my work into urban worlds, and through publications and through museums, and through books, so I don't know any other way to do that."

Shipbreaking #5 Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000

"Looking at Bangladesh, I personally had a kind of a problem and a crisis with it as coming from the first world. And we know that cutting marine paints and being two feet away and the smoke going into your face. We know that's a carcinogenic. We know that when you go in and break apart asbestos and have no filters and no masks that you're condemning these people to kind of an early death."

Shipbreaking #11 Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000

"There's a real moral dilemma in mankind that we're blindly kind of not wanting to deal with that because it's expensive. Breaking a ship, for instance, properly would quadruple the costs, and no one wants to bear those costs so they just sell it. ' I don't care what happens after I sell it.' So there is, I think, an abdication of responsibility that the first world kind of has been doing."

Shipbreaking #13 Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000

Shipbreaking #23 Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000

"You'd have to almost be under a rock not to recognize that now, I think it's pretty well documented through news and stories and articles and paper and all that. We've exported a lot of our dirty industries, we're using that developing world to do the kind of things we no longer want to do."

Sikorsky Helicopter Scrap Yard Tucson, Arizona, USA, 2006

"Beauty I think is not the right word, but what compels us to want to enter an image, to understand it, is that there is a more universality to that. I think we understand images ... we've all been around them long enough to know when we're drawn into something, when we want to go deeper into a visual image. And I think in today's society with millions of images, billions of images being made, [it's] pretty challenging to make images that people want to spend time with, and that can actually make people learn something from or get something from both emotionally [and] intellectually and that's what I'm interested in doing as an artist."

SOCAR Oil Fields #3 Baku, Azerbaijan, 2006

I think Baku, Azerbaijan ... In that chapter, I refer to it as the end of oil, that ultimately we are exploiting a resource that has a finite limit to it. Yes, there's more under the ground in places, but the big finds are gone. The kinds of oil fields that have been found in Saudi Arabia, we haven't found anything like that for decades.

SOCAR Oil Fields #4 Baku, Azerbaijan, 2006

"That was in Azerbaijan and that was one of the few places on the planet where the oil is actually on the surface which is not a good thing. It's usually number one or number two spot for the most polluted place on the planet. So it is a nasty kind of environment. And oil, if you're in the presence of oil, is like a mirror. it's very, very reflective. So I was able to capture in the image the abandoned derricks because the area had been depleted about 20 years earlier, so I was able to show this abandoned oil field reflected in oil, and to me it was a kind of a powerful visual and also a metaphor for us to reflect into this material."

Suburbs #1 North Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 2007

"The myth that, if we talk about mythology, is the one that we are living - is the one of infinite growth. To me that is really the true myth that we're living, that this can just go on in perpetuity and grow and grow and grow with no limits."

Suburbs #3, with quarryNorth Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 2007

"Consumer capitalism seems to be the mechanism that everyone's bought into. You know that brings a lot of questions: like has it [really] brought true happiness or is it just a lot of frustration? And a lot of people working very hard, not to get very far ahead in life, and missing in a way the great things that life has to offer, which has very little to do with owning more crap, and has a lot to do with friends, and your family, and experiences that you have, and your own development, and your own enrichment, which doesn't necessarily have to have a material component to it."

Talladega Speedway #2 Birmingham, Alabama, USA, 2009

"Part of wanting to bring those images into the oil story was: First, I was trying to think of where in our culture, you know, has the internal combustion engine and the fuel that drives it is the central organizing principle of the group getting together? So motorcycle rallies and NASCAR racing, at the centre core is the machine, and the culture that's grown up around the machine. So the motorcycle is the culture of freedom and liberty and anti-establishment and 'go out there', and Easy Rider type, and freedom of the road, and all that [it] implies. It's kind of the American Dream, it's kind of the part of rebel."

Trucker’s Jamboree #1 Walcott, Iowa, USA, 2003

"I understand in way the limitations of the working guy: 'This is a problem bigger than I can deal with and I've got a job, and it's a good job, and I get good food on my table.' And I think, currently capitalism seems to be the only game in town - planetary-wise. Everybody's going down that road."