By Kate Brown
Artnet
Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky is sort of like a sleuth: He produces evidence of humans’ impact on the planet. Gaining access to hard-to-reach places in our world—tar sands, nickel mines, sawmills, or shipyards—Burtynsky culls poignant imagery to show us how we have transformed the earth around us at a vast and debilitating scale. There is a cost to modern life and its massive, if usually just out of view.
At a time when the climate is finally starting to rear from the effects of industry, his work has become even more urgent. It is no great surprise then the artist, who is based in Toronto, was recently awarded this year’s Outstanding Contribution to Photography by the World Photography Organization. His work will be on view at the 2022 Sony World Photography Awards exhibition at Somerset House in London beginning April 15, 2022.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreCBC Ideas
Renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky has an origin story about the start of his illustrious career. It was his first assignment as a student at Ryerson Polytechnic Institute: to go out and photograph "evidence of man."
"This is 1976," Burtynsky explained in a recent online talk for the Ontario Heritage Trust. "And as I started thinking about that idea, I thought, 'Well, what can I do with this?'"
Read the article and listen to the episode here.
Read MoreBy Sarah Rose Sharp
Hyperallergic
Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky received high honors today, November 24, recognized for his “Outstanding Contribution to Photography” by the World Photography Organisation’s 2022 Sony World Photography Awards. Burtynsky’s work captures wide-angle views of industrial processes and waste and their interactions with natural ecosystems. Over decades, his work has examined the complex process of resource extraction, use, and disposal, revealing its impact in vivid detail. His images combine technical skill with sweeping scale and expert composition, using aesthetic wonder to twist the knife of abject environmental damage.
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Read MoreThe Nicholas Metivier Gallery is pleased to announce that Salt Pan #18 by Edward Burtynsky has been acquired by The J. Paul Getty Museum as part of their permanent collection.
Read the full announcement here.
Read MoreThe Nicholas Metivier Gallery is pleased to announce that Lithium Mines #2 by Edward Burtynsky has been acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of their permanent collection. The Met's Department of Photographs houses a collection of more than 75,000 works spanning the history of photography from its invention in the 1830s to the present.
Read the full announcement here.
Read MoreBy Alex Derry
Toronto Life Insider
Edward Burtynsky is one of the world’s most accomplished contemporary photographers. His latest project, In the Wake of Progress, will make its virtual world premiere with Luminato Festival on October 16, 2021. We spoke with Burtynsky about his 40-year journey as an artist depicting global industrial landscapes, how his work is a call to action for collective action on climate change, and more.
Read the full interview here.
Read MoreBy Connie Vitello
Environment Journal
Did you know that it can take over 450 years for a single plastic water bottle to decompose? Meanwhile, one million single-use plastic water bottles are consumed every minute globally, according to latest estimates. That equates to over 500 billion bottles year. Canadians alone consume approximately 2.5 billion litres of bottled water that results in 10,000 tonnes of plastics entering the Great Lakes every year.
A new exhibit at Evergreen Brick Works in Toronto, Ontario highlights the adverse impact of single-use plastic bottle pollution through world renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky‘s thought-provoking work and a unique augmented reality (AR) experience by AVARA Media.
The exhibit, titled H20, includes works from Burtynsky’s Water series and is featured alongside the AR experience that helps guests visualize the adverse impacts of single-use plastic bottle waste, a problem with devastating consequences for human health, wildlife, and water quality.
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Read MoreBy Sophie Bernard
Blind: Photography at First Sight
Edward Burtynsky, whose work over the past thirty years has been focused on ecology, combines aesthetic and documentary approaches. The exhibition at the Pavillon Populaire in Montpellier, showcasing some fifty images on the theme of water, is also an opportunity to explore the notion of commitment.
The drying Colorado River in the Southwestern United States and Owens Lake in California; cities built in the middle of the desert, such as Phoenix, Arizona; intensive shellfish farms in Sonora, Mexico; rivers polluted by the use of chemical fertilizers or the extraction of natural resources, such as phosphorus; the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico; and the enormous dams built in China: these are just some of the subjects addressed in the fifty or so images on display at the Pavillon Populaire in Montpellier.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Austin Price
Earth Island Journal
In the late 1960s, a teenage Edward Burtynsky began discovering the rhythms of nature during family fishing trips to Ontario’s Haliburton Highlands. On glistening lakes surrounded by birch and pine, Burtynsky cast his lures for muskies, a pike common in the Great Lakes region, but he returned home with something more substantial.
“That experience of wilderness left an enduring mark that still informs my response to landscape,” Burtynsky, now a world-renowned photographer, writes in his latest book Anthropocene.
As a photographer, however, it isn’t just the wilderness that captures his eye. After those fishing trips, he would return to his hometown of St. Catharines, Ontario, a town near Niagara Falls where, at the time, General Motors factories employed most of the area’s population. That tension — between a wild landscape and one controlled and manufactured — defines the core of Burtynsky’s work.
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Read MoreBy Victoria Ahearn
Toronto Star
TORONTO - Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, filmmaker Director X and theatre artist Christine Brubaker are among the artists set to present original works at the Luminato Festival Toronto this fall.
The three will headline the annual arts and culture event, which will feature free film and digital experiences and a drive-in concert Oct. 13 to 17.
Read the full article here.
More on In the Wake of Progress here.
Read MoreWork/Place Podcast
How will the workforce shift towards climate adaptation? Is the future of work all about climate resilience and/or carbon mitigation projects? Edward Burtynsky joins Sydney Allen-Ash and Lane founders, Clinton Robinson and Kofi Gyekye for a conversation on possibilities for future roles in light of global climate crises, environmental degradation, and resource depletion.
Listen to the episode here.
Read MoreThe Modern House
Edward Burtynsky has been investigating natural landscapes for over 35 years, producing sweeping views of environments transformed by industry. In the collaboration with British Journal of Photography, here, the photographer discusses his approach.
His collaborative, multidisciplinary body of work, The Anthropocene Project, is influenced by the proposed new geologic era – ‘Anthropocene’ – a concept popularised in 2000 by the late chemist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Jozef Crutzen, representing a formal acknowledgement of the “human signature” on Earth. Working alongside filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, Burtynsky travelled to 20 countries over a period of five years, photographing altercations such as the lithium mines of Chile’s Atacama desert, the psychedelic potash ores of Russia’s Ural Mountains, and the effects of oil bunkering in the Niger Delta.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Mathieu Sly
NGC Magazine
This year 22 April is both Earth Day and Throw Back Thursday, so it is an ideal opportunity to reflect back upon a powerful exhibition presented at the National Gallery of Canada in 2018: Anthropocene. When I came to see the exhibition, it was as a visitor and I had not done any research, showing up instead with the approach “What are we doing today?” I was immediately confronted with images of a world seen from above, and this world was being consumed by our appetites – by my appetites. Although these images clearly left an imprint on my mind, I all too quickly slid back into the distractions of normal life. That is, until our current global health crisis.
Anthropocene presented works by the collective of Canadian artists comprising photographer Edward Burtynsky and filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier. These striking images, videos and augmented-reality sculptures invited reflection on the ethics of humanity’s exploitation of Earth’s resources. As the exhibition’s co-curator Sophie Hackett commented, we were “confronted with a world we inhabit but cannot easily see.” The artists captured it in such a way that we could see. And how could the viewer not pause when looking at these images?
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Read MoreChristie’s
To celebrate Earth Day, we showcase eight contemporary artists using their work to advance environmental issues
With the rise of Greta Thunberg, increasing talk of a ‘green recovery’ from Covid-19, and the COP26 conference now just months away, the climate crisis has never been more of a talking point. Among those calling for action before it’s too late are some of the world’s leading contemporary artists. Here, we look at eight who are using their practice to spotlight the environment, tackle the urgency of climate change, and champion sustainability.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Anqi Shen
University Affairs
Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is donating a portion of his work, spanning nearly five decades of his career, to Ryerson University. Some of his early images, selected by Mr. Burtynsky himself, are now featured in a virtual public gallery through the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC), while prints and materials from later years are in the process of being curated.
The 65-year-old photographer is internationally renowned for his large-scale landscapes depicting the impact of human industry on nature and the effects of climate change. While the collection at the RIC includes images that embody his iconic style, it also considers some of his earlier works that had a personal dimension, says the RIC’s director, Paul Roth.
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Read MoreBy Bill Gates
Financial Times
Illustrated with photographs by Edward Burtynsky
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Read MoreHE Art Museum
How did you illustrate the contrast between the spectacular landscape and the scattered vehicles and buildings in your work Highland Valley #8? What message are you trying to deliver?
Edward Burtynsky: The shot was created by working closely with a helicopter pilot, flying tight circles above the pit at the right distance. I wanted to convey the contemporary scale of copper mining and this was a mine that I’d originally photographed in 1983 before I was using aerial photography, and it had increased dramatically over the years since. As is consistent throughout much of my work, I try to connect the viewer to the places in the world where we get the materials that allow us to live a contemporary life. Like copper for computers, nickel to create stainless steel etc.
Read the full interview here.
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