Photo London is delighted to announce Canadian fine art photographer Edward Burtynsky as its Master of Photography for 2018. Burtynsky’s practice eloquently chronicles human impact on the planet. His images are widely regarded as key visual documents of our time.
As part of Photo London’s 2018 Public Programme, Burtynsky will present a special exhibition of new and rarely-seen work. Discover images exploring diverse subjects such as urbanisation, industrialisation and extraction, from oil bunkering and sawmills in Nigeria to the salt pans at the Little Rann of Kutch, in Gujarat, India; at once conveying the sublime qualities of human-marked landscapes and the unsettling reality of sweeping resource depletion.
Known for pushing the technical limits of photography in his work, Burtynsky will present a newly developed Augmented Reality (AR) experience, which visitors will be able to engage with in the exhibition space.
Burtynsky is currently engaged in a five-year multi-disciplinary project with long time collaborators Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier on the Anthropocene, a proposed name for our present geological age in which humans have had a profound influence on the earth and its systems. “We’ve had five great extinctions,” Burtynsky says, referring to prehistoric devastations from the “Great Dying” of the Permian eruptions, to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. “Now our species is having a similar effect.”
Co-presented by the Art Gallery of Ontario and National Gallery of Canada, and co-produced by MAST Foundation in Bologna, Italy, the Anthropocene exhibition will open in September 2018 in Toronto and Ottawa.
To accompany the exhibition, supported by the High Commission of Canada, Burtynsky will be speaking as part of the acclaimed annual Photo London Talks Programme on Thursday 17 May.