NEWS HUB

Review: Anthropocene is a shocking and beautiful documentary

By Kate Taylor
The Globe and Mail

★★★★

Vast rectangular ponds of foul yellow water lie evaporating in the Chilean desert; they will produce the lithium that powers electric-car batteries. A gorgeous red-and-grey rock is imprinted with an eye-catching circular pattern: It’s the mark of Russian potash mining, extracting one of the fertilizers that is permanently altering the composition of the Earth’s soil. Anthropocene: The Human Epoch is packed with such shattering images and astounding ironies. As documentarians Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier pursue their collaboration with photographer Edward Burtynsky in a third film (following Manufactured Landscapes and Watermark), they strike a delicate yet purposeful balance between observation and advocacy. Both shocking and beautiful, the film impresses itself on the viewer with the awesome scale of the imagery – and with the urgency behind it. We have entered an epoch in which human activity is shaping the planet more than any natural force. Anthropocene bears witness that something’s got to give.

The film Anthropocene: The Human Epoch opens Friday in Toronto, Oct. 5 in Vancouver, Oct. 19 in Montreal and through the fall in other cities.

Documenting our Man-Made Epoch

The Agenda with Steve Paikin

Aired September 28

Photographer Edward Burtynsky, filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, and director of photography Nicholas De Pencier join Steve Paikin to discuss "Anthropocene: The Human Epoch." The multifaceted project explores humankind's tremendous effect on planet Earth.

Watch the segment here.

The directing trio behind Anthropocene hope you walk away enlightened and transformed

By Chris Knight
National Post

The three directors of Anthropocene: The Human Epoch are trying to describe the editing process required to bring an estimated 375 hours –15 days! – of footage down to a 90-minute documentary.

Jennifer Baichwal likens it to a jigsaw puzzle. “Some people have the picture right there,” she says. “And some people look at it once and then hide it. This is like putting a massive puzzle together without ever seeing the picture.”

Edward Burtynsky chimes in: “And it’s got 2,000 pieces that don’t belong.”

Not to be left out, Nicholas de Pencier adds: “And half the pieces don’t actually fit!”

Editing Anthropocene – the title refers to a suggested name for the current geological era, one in which humans are the dominant force on the planet’s ecosystem – was a year-long process, after three years spent travelling to six continents to find material, including mining operations in Germany, the U.S., Italy and Norilsk, in northern Russia; a 57-kilometre rail tunnel in Switzerland; a huge seawall in China (a nation known for its wall-building prowess); and efforts to save endangered species in Kenya.

Read the full article here.

New exhibit Anthropocene opens at the Art Gallery of Ontario

Metro Morning with Matt Galloway

A new art exhibition opens today at the AGO, looking at how humans have irreversibly transformed the planet. We hear from the three artists at the centre of the project: photographer Edward Burtynsky and filmmakers filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier.

Listen here.

Anthropocene art show and documentary will shock you with a view of human impact on the planet

By Kate Taylor
The Globe and Mail

The project, which includes not only a new documentary but also two museum exhibitions and an art book, gives a chilling, yet sometimes beautiful, examination of the indelible and spreading mark of human activity on the planet.

Like some eerie sculpture, a dome-shaped pile of elephant tusks glimmers in a darkened gallery. It’s a non-existent thing, the virtual recreation of a huge cache of contraband ivory burned to ashes two years ago.

Poaching is pushing the African elephant to the brink, yet another example of our species' pervasive impact on the planet. The indelible and spreading mark of human activity is the meaning of the term Anthropocene and the theme of a four-year collaboration between award-winning landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky and the documentary filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier. Following on their environmental films Manufactured Landscapes and Watermark, the Anthropocene project includes not only a new documentary but also two museum exhibitions and an art book.

To produce it, the trio visited every continent except Antarctica, stopping in 20 different countries. One of those countries was Kenya where in 2016 their cameras recorded an unusual event: the burning of 100 tonnes of elephant tusks and rhino horns by government officials. Determined to save these species by demonstrating to poachers that the ivory and horn is worthless unless attached to a living animal, the Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta set light to the largest pile.

Read the full article here.

ANTHROPOCENE shows fierce beauty of rapidly collapsing Earth

By Peter Howell
Toronto Star

★★★★

ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch — a companion piece to exhibitions of the same name opening Friday at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery in Ottawa — is rife with such horrors, yet there’s a fierce beauty to the work of Baichwal, Burtynsky and de Pencier. They travel the world with an artful lens that makes human constructions seem awe-inspiring — but only from a distance.

Read the full review here.

Toronto's most famous photographer brings stunning images to the AGO

Amy Carlberg
BlogTO

Edward Burtynsky has arrived at the AGO along with collaborators Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier in a sprawling exhibit that explores the impact humans have had on the earth. In Anthropocene, chilling yet beautiful images come to life through large scale photography, video and augmented reality installations.

Check out the photo gallery here.

Master photog Edward Burtynsky shows us the lay of the land in new National Gallery exhibit

Lynn Saxberg
Ottawa Citizen

Master photographer Edward Burtynsky has dedicated much of his life to documenting the impact of humans on earth through dramatic, large-format photographs of industrial landscapes around the world.

The St. Catharines-born artist has won numerous awards for his work, and his striking photos are included in the collections of some of the world’s most prestigious institutions, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, as well as the Tate Modern in London.

Now a powerful new multi-media exhibition, Anthropocene, opens this week at the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario. The accompanying film, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, a TIFF 2018 special presentation, will be screened at the gallery Thursday.

The result of a four-year collaboration between Burtynsky and filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, the Anthropocene project consists of large-scale photographs, films, high-resolution murals with film extensions, and augmented reality installations that bring you into the landscape. The title refers to the proposed geological term for the current epoch, defining an age when human activity has been the dominant force in changing the planet.

Read the full article here.

Human-altered landscapes: visions of the Anthropocene

By Zoë Ducklow
National Gallery of Canada Magazine

It was two years ago, while hovering over the Niger Delta in a two-dollar-per-second rented helicopter that Edward Burtynsky saw an oil-soaked scene of apocalyptic scale. Images of oily waterways flicker in dull rainbow hues; landscapes shine black and are littered with scorched trees; a boat speeds away from the helicopter. He had heard about oil theft in the petroleum-rich Nigerian delta, but looking at it from this vantage point, he knew it was something the world hadn’t yet seen.

“They are really tough images. They speak to a very challenging situation,” Burtynsky says. Nigeria has substantial petroleum deposits, with oil and gas pipelines dissecting the delta. Locals siphon oil from pipelines and crudely distill diesel and gasoline – profitable, marketable products. But over half of the crude oil needs sophisticated refining to be turned into anything useful. “They didn’t have a refinery. They couldn’t do anything with it. So they just poured it off on the landscape,” Burtynsky observes. It is unclear how much oil gets siphoned off, but the Nigerian government estimates 250,000 barrels daily, over half of which gets dumped. “These landscapes have oil just oozing out of them.”

The images Burtynsky made that day are one story in The Anthropocene Project, the third collaboration between Burtynsky and documentary filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier. (The two previous collaborations were the highly acclaimed Manufactured Landscapes and Watermark.) The project forms the basis of the National Gallery of Canada's multimedia exhibition Anthropocene, which brings together large-scale photographs, twelve film installations and integrated video displays, high-resolution murals and immersive Augmented Reality (AR) sculptures. A simultaneous, complementary exhibition is being held at the Art Gallery of Ontario and another showing will take place at the Fondazione MAST in Bologna next year, all being accompanied by a publication and TIFF 2018 premiere screenings of the film Anthropocene: The Human Epoch.

Read the full article here.

Anthropocene project highlights the apocalyptic beauty of humans' effect on the planet

CBC Radio: The Current

The burning of 10,000 elephant tusks piled into an enormous funeral pyres in Kenya's National Park in Nairobi is both a devastating and beautiful image to look at — a reaction that photographer Edward Burtynsky intended.

His photographs are part of a multimedia project called Anthropocene that merges film, photography and virtual reality installations to illustrate the imprint humans are collectively leaving on the planet.

"We want to communicate out there with people. We want them to look at these things, to try to ask questions about these landscapes," he told The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti.

"If you represent them in … an unsightly light or whatever, they don't resonate. They don't make us wonder about this place."

Read the full article and listen to the interview here.

Anthropocene reveals the scale of Earth's existential crisis

By Kevin Ritchie
NOW Toronto

Can a geological epoch become a household word?

For the last 12,000-odd years, the earth enjoyed the Holocene, the period of stable climate since the end of the last ice age. Nearly two decades ago, scientists popularized the term Anthropocene to describe the new period we are believed to have moved into – one in which human impact on earth has overtaken all other forces shaping the future.

“The word Anthropocene has been around for a while, but I thought, ‘What about trying to make that word enter the vernacular?’” says director Jennifer Baichwal during an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month. “Most people have no idea the scale of our impact. We are now a greater force than any other natural process, like earthquakes and tsunamis. We’re at a precipice here.”

Read the full article https://nowtoronto.com/culture/art-and-design/anthropocene-burtynsky-baichwal-ago/.

'Reconnecting us to the wastelands': AGO's new photo exhibit shows what humanity's doing to the planet

By Trevor Dunn
CBC News

A new exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario seeks to reveal the way human activity is transforming the planet.

Just how the cumulative action of seven billion people is shaping the environment may be difficult, if not impossible, to grasp.

But the oversized photographs by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky have always sought to at least bring us a bit closer to that truth.

"These are human landscapes. We walk away and leave them as dead. But they are part of us and we need to understand them," Burtynsky said in an interview.

Read the full article here.

Apocalypse Now

By Mark Pupo
Toronto Life

Over the past 40 years, the photographer Edward Burtynsky has hunted down the world’s largest marble quarries, clear-cut forests and solar power fields. His super-sized shots showcase our ravenous appetite for Earth’s resources—Burtynsky is a war photographer of natural landscapes. For his latest project, Anthropocene, he reunited with his frequent collaborators, filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier. They travelled to 20 countries, collecting evidence of what some scientists call the anthropocene—a new epoch that began with the industrial revolution, maybe, or the nuclear bomb, in which humans took full possession of Earth. Burtynsky, characteristically, went big, producing a documentary that debuted at TIFF, a coffee table book and a multimedia exhibit, showing this fall at the National Gallery of Canada and the AGO. The result is urgent, edifying and technologically dazzling.

Read the full article here.

Living in the Anthropocene, the human epoch

By Alexandra Pope
Canadian Geographic

Climate change, extinctions, invasive species, the terraforming of land, the redirection of water: all are evidence of the ways human activity has shaped and continues to shape Earth’s natural processes.

Scientists have coined a word to describe this unprecedented age of human impact on the planet: the Anthropocene. Although not yet officially recognized as an epoch on the geological time scale, “Anthropocene” has been used informally to describe anywhere from the last 15,000 to the last 70 years of history — a period of significant and accelerating human-driven change.

The scale and consequences of our influence upon the Earth are explored in a groundbreaking new multimedia work by three award-winning Canadian artists — photographer Edward Burtynsky and filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier. Through film, photography, and cutting-edge augmented reality (AR) elements, The Anthropocene Project immerses viewers in the realities of our present age.

Read the full article here.

Cinefest: Stark warning amidst beauty

By Mary Keown
The Sudbury Star

There is a scene in Anthropocene: The Human Epoch during which a man nonchalantly jumps off the ladder of an excavator.

It is the largest excavator in the world and as the camera pans outward, you realize just how enormous this piece of equipment really is. This excavator, which resembles some kind of post-Apocalyptic nightmarish monster claw from the Mad Max films, is used in the coal mines of western Germany. It stands more than 300 feet high and 700 feet long. It weighs 45,500 tonnes and includes a dozen chassis. Reputed to be one of, if not the largest, land vehicles on earth, it is a sad testament to human innovation.

Read the full article here.

Anthropocene’s Three Filmmakers and Ecological Disaster

By Susan G. Cole
POV Magazine

Lights, camera, spectacular success – backlash. So it goes with the films co-created by Ed Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier. The trio is launching Anthropocene, the third in their eco-conscious trilogy that began with Manufactured Landscapes and continued with Watermark, which won the Toronto Critics Film Associations’s best Canadian feature award and $100,000 from media giant Rogers.

The new film, with research assistant from the Anthropocene Working Group and anchored by Burtynsky’s arresting photographic vision of the planet’s devastation at the hands of humans, makes the argument that we’ve moved away from the Holocene Epoch, when the forces of nature transformed our earth, to the Epoch of the Anthropocene, when major changes to our landscape are primarily wrought by man-made technologies and waste we are responsible for as human beings.

Read the full article here.

TIFF Review: ‘ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch’

By Patrick Mullen
Point of View Magazine

Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky, Nicholas de Pencier document the devastating consequences of human activity in Anthropocene. In a way, they’ve been documenting it for nearly fifteen years. Anthropocene is the third installment in the team’s epic trilogy of spectacular environmental essay films that began with Manufactured Landscapes (2006) andWatermark (2013). The latest film is the culmination of a major body of work and it’s as visually stunning and intellectually invigorating as the previous two films are. Anthropocene, admittedly, is also a film they’ve made before—although they’ve never quite made a film on such an astonishing scale as this one.

Read the full review here.

Anthropocene: The Human Epoch is Edward Burtynksy’s Devastating Call to Action

By Elizabeth Pagliacolo
Azure Magazine

Edward Burtynsky’s new doc (debuting at TIFF) and upcoming exhibition (at the AGO) make the case – through stunning photography – that humans are impacting the Earth more than all natural systems combined.

There is a scene in Anthropocene: The Human Epoch where the camera hovers on a concentric circular motif – a giant bloodshot eye, amidst an abstract swirl of red, blue, yellow, white. As the camera pulls back, the pattern fills the screen yet remains inscrutable. What are we looking at? Finally, zoomed away, we can place ourselves in the Russian potash mine, the circles on the labyrinthine walls are stamped by the boring machines that have sculpted this otherworldy landscape.

Read the full article here.

These photos show just how much damage humans have done to the planet

By Adele Peters
Fast Company

At the Dandora landfill in Nairobi–which officially shut down in 2012, but where people haven’t stopped dumping trash–some mounds made mostly of plastic bags rise 15 feet high.

In Edward Burtynsky’s new photo book, Anthropocene, the landfill represents the idea of “technofossils”–human-made objects, from plastic to mobile phones and cement, that will show up in the future fossil record. (Part-plastic rocks, dubbed plastigomerate, already exist.)

The book is part of a larger multimedia project, made with Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, called The Anthropocene Project, which also includes a documentary premiering today and a series of augmented reality experiences that will be part of museum shows opening on September 28. It all focuses on the Anthropocene, a term coined in 2000 to describe what some scientists argue is a new geological epoch shaped by humans as we transform landscapes, drive a sixth mass extinction, and change the climate.

Read the full article here.

Edward Burtynsky’s Anthropocene premieres at TIFF

By Jessica Wei
Post City Toronto

The renowned Toronto-based photographer Edward Burtynsky’s career has traced the movement of humans on this earth through the industrial footprint we’ve left on it. Now, his career culminates in his latest work, Anthropocene.

The new multi-disciplinary art, publishing and film project, in collaboration with director Jennifer Baichwal and cinematographer Nicholas de Pencier, encompasses a feature documentary premiering this year at TIFF, exhibitions at the AGO and the National Gallery in Ottawa and a new book.

Burtynsky has had a long and illustrious career tracking the visible ways that industrialization has impacted natural landscapes. He is known for his sweeping aerial shots of mines, quarries, railroads, and other markers of the industrial era. His last documentary, 2013’s Watermark, was made in collaboration with Baichwal and de Pencier, and focused primarily on the changing relationship between humans and the water that runs around us. Like most of Burtynsky’s work, it was mesmerizing in its imagery, with surreal shots taken high above Texas plains, at such an altitude as to render water table aquifers into abstract objects resembling cross sections of logs. Through his camera lens, river deltas stretch outwards like barren tree branches, and ponds of phosphor tailings ponds become sample cells on a microscope slide.

Read the full article here.