RBC Disruptors
The COVID-19 crisis has redefined the way we experience the world around us, but long before that, advances in augmented and virtual reality were beginning to allow audiences to view the world through a new lens. In this episode of RBC Disruptors, John Stackhouse speaks to iconic Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky and his business partner and gaming expert, Vikas Gupta about how we can use technology to enhance the human experience in a post-COVID society.
Read the full post and listen to the podcast here.
Read MoreA Photo London Academy Production
Photo London is delighted to launch our inaugural e-magazine with a feature on Canadian fine art photographer Edward Burtynsky. Renowned for his monumental aerial photographs documenting the “indelible human signature” on our planet, Burtynsky was also Photo London’s Master of Photography in 2018, during which he presented a special exhibition of new and rarely seen works exploring diverse subjects such as urbanisation, industrialisation and extraction, as well as a newly developed Augmented Reality (AR) experience. For this first issue of our e-magazine, Burtynsky has shared his personal, intimate reflections on the current global crisis; a crisis that has certainly left its mark on the history of mankind, ironically not dissimilar to the man-made effects of urbanisation and deforestation on nature that are chronicled in Burtynsky’s oeuvre.
Read Issue 01 here.
Read MoreBy Sarah Leen
National Geographic
If you’re doing your duty and staying home—but getting tired of binge-watching, baking, and seeing your friends on a screen—there’s a clever way to do some armchair traveling, meet cool animals, and discover stories that might touch your heart.
I’m talking about what my mother called “picture books.”
Every photographer I know wants their images published in a book. It gives their work the validation and permanence they just can’t get from a screen. You can’t fall in love with a website the way you can with a book. Here are some of my favorite books that you can order from an online bookseller.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreRight now the message of Earth Day, on its 50th anniversary, seems more urgent than ever. There’s no doubt that the ravenous human appetite to conquer nature has compelled us to encroach on natural habitats and biodiversity in an ever-expanding way, and that this has led us to where we are today — isolated at home with a new pathogen determined to wreak global havoc. It seems the paradigm has shifted: where humans once had our collective boot on nature’s neck, we now find ourselves with nature’s boot firmly pressed against ours.
Gerhard Richter once said that “art is the highest form of hope” and my hope is that during this time in isolation I am able to create a suite of images, going back to my roots and looking at nature, with proceeds going directly to support the art sector in Canada.
The arts have taken an oversized hit during these times and will continue to suffer enormously because of this crisis. And yet, it is the artists, musicians, filmmakers and performers to whom we are all turning for catharsis, relaxation, distraction, entertainment and, perhaps most importantly, hope. Artists now need our support as much as we need theirs.
I do not know what the next few months will bring, but in this time of isolation and contemplation, I can be assured of one very important thing: the future of life on this planet rests in our hands. There may one day soon be a vaccine for this virus, but there is no vaccine for climate change.
Until such a time as life can return to something we are a little more familiar with, please stay safe and be well.
– Ed
Read MoreBy Edward Burtynsky
The Globe & Mail
It feels a little surreal to be commemorating the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in the middle of this unprecedented global crisis. Admittedly, I had envisioned this day much differently, yet with COVID-19 forcing us all into isolation, the message of Earth Day seems more urgent than ever.
My 40-year career as an artist has taken me on a journey around our planet in search of the largest examples of human systems expressed upon the land and sea. I have been to many places that very few of us have any reason to go – the places where we wrest out the things we need from nature to propel our human destiny. My first trip to China in 2002 took me to Wuhan en route to photograph along the Yangtze River, where entire cities and landscapes were being commandeered and flattened to make way for the building of the Three Gorges Dam. So, when the pictures first emerged of the coronavirus lockdown in Wuhan months ago, never did I imagine seeing cities being shut down in this new and devastating way – or that we would soon experience this contagion all over the world.
There’s no doubt that the ravenous human appetite to conquer nature has compelled us to encroach on natural habitats and biodiversity in an ever-expanding way, and that this has led us to where we are today – isolated at home, with a new pathogen determined to wreak global havoc. It seems the paradigm has shifted: Where humans once had our collective boot on nature’s neck, we now find ourselves with nature’s boot firmly pressed against ours.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Shinan Govani
Toronto Star
Peering at it all through the Lewis Carroll-like looking-glass of Instagram, shortly after catching up on “Top Chef,” I stumbled upon the feed of one of Toronto’s best-travelled people, Edward Burtynsky. Interesting! A J.M.W. Turner for our time (as he has been called), the marquee photographer — known for his sweeping industrial landscapes which rest in collections ranging everywhere from the Tate to the Guggenheim, and which have earned Burtynsky enough of a following to warrant an extensive profile in The New Yorker a few years back — he is grounded, these days, like most of us. But has been making the best of it. Actually making, I should say.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Edward Burtynsky
National Geographic Magazine
Few people see where the resources that make their life possible come from. Most of us see skyscrapers but don’t see the silica mines that created the glass… We see farmland but not the forests that used to grow there—or the potash mines that provide the fertilizer that nourishes the crops.
Read MoreBy Shiralee Hudson Hill
Journal of Museum Education
ABSTRACT
Art has the power to activate learning and emotion in unique ways—this is true of humans generally, and museum visitors specifically. Yet art galleries are often overlooked in the museum field as forums for dialogue and sites of learning about climate change. This article investigates the significance of artist-led projects and art museum exhibitions in engaging visitors with issues of climate change and greater planetary change through the lens of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Anthropocene exhibition featuring the work of Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier and the related Anthropocene Project by the same trio of artists.
Read the full article here.
Read Morela Repubblica
The exhibition at the Mast was also visited by 15 thousand students
BOLOGNA - It was supposed to remain open for 4 months, it closed on January 5 after eight months of extraordinary turnout. Anthropocene, the exhibition of photographs on the changing environment hosted by the Mast of Bologna, since May 16 has been visited by 155 thousand people, impressed by the project of the international group of scientists Anthropocene Working Group which has documented the changes that man has imprinted on earth and the effects of human activities on natural processes through the combination of art, cinema, augmented reality and scientific research.
Read the full article here.
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