A Lens on Sustainability
Prix Pictet
Renowned for his large format photographs of industrial landscapes, acclaimed Prix Pictet shortlisted photographer and jury member Edward Burtynsky has spent a lifetime capturing the scale and magnitude of human impact on its environment. In this special mini-documentary and podcast, we discuss his journey into Anthropocene photography, traversing the globe in search of landscapes marred by human intervention. Watch the short video and listen to the podcast to learn more about his work, which serves as a stark reminder of the urgent need to address the climate crisis.
Listen to the podcast episode 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.
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?
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Kate Bubacz
BuzzFeed News
Edward Burtynsky, a legendary landscape photographer, has spent the past three decades looking at how resources are used and the impact of humans on the environment around the globe. He collaborated with Nicholas de Pencier and Jennifer Baichwal on his newest project, Anthropocene, which combines scientific research with film, virtual reality, augmented reality, and photographs, and is also available as a book.
The photographs from the project are both haunting and eye-opening, offering a unique perspective on the collective result of decisions around the globe. "I have come to think of my preoccupation with the Anthrocepene — the indelible marks left by humankind on the geological face of our planet — as a conceptual extension of my first and most fundamental interests as a photographer" he says in the book's introduction.
Read the interview 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.
Read MorePopcorn Talk
Join Frank Moran as he interviews filmmakers: Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier, and Edward Burtynsky.
“Anthropocene” is defined as the current geological epoch in which humans are the primary cause of permanent planetary change. The upcoming documentary ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch is unflinching in its depiction of the destruction of the natural world, using extraordinary imagery from celebrated photographer Edward Burtynsky, who directed the film with Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier.
Watch the interview here.
Read MoreBy Robert Abele
Los Angeles Times
A movie thousands of years in the making, “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch” takes cameras to where our consumptive need has most alarmingly re-engineered the planet. It’s also, in many ways, a document of a spiritual/environmental undoing.
Filming across a dozen countries, Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky continue the visual breadth of their previously observed warning shots about the scope of progress (“Manufactured Landscapes,” “Watermark”) with a reflective tour of excavation, industry and decimation that argues we’ve already moved into a new geological epoch owned entirely by us.
Dotted with alarming facts delivered in gravely intoned voice-over by Alicia Vikander, “Anthropocene” finds the terrible awe in town-destroying terraforming projects in Germany worked by earthmovers of “Mad Max”-like magnitude, the sweeping wretchedness of a city-sized African landfill scavenged by thousands of the poor working alongside sickly looking pelicans, and what the acid-caused bleaching of coral reefs looks like via time lapse photography.
Read the full review here.
Read MoreBy Ben Kenigsberg
The New York Times
“Anthropocene: The Human Epoch” puts a frightening twist on the standard nature documentary. Rather than exalting the awesome beauty of landscapes or animals, it captures alarming ways in which that beauty has been disturbed.
The movie takes its cues from the research of the Anthropocene Working Group, a team of scientists who in 2016 recommended a formal declaration of the end of Earth’s Holocene epoch, which began as many as 12,000 years ago. They argued that we are now in a new geologic phase, the Anthropocene epoch — a time when humans now change the Earth more than all the planet’s natural processes combined.
The film, part of a multidisciplinary project by Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky, hops from continent to continent to depict the scale of those disruptions, which at times have an almost science fiction quality.
Read the full review here.
Read MoreVideo by Heather Sharpe and Laura Foster
BBC News
Edward Burtynsky travels the world trying to capture striking images of humanity's impact on the planet, from the fossil-like shapes left behind by drills in a Potash mine to the luminescent colours of lithium ponds.
The Canadian photographic artist has spent 40 years focusing on large-scale human activities such as mining, quarrying, agriculture and deforestation - but he says he doesn't see himself as an environmentalist.
His latest project, Anthropocene, is a collaboration with film-makers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, exploring the idea proposed by some scientists that a geological epoch shaped by human activity has begun.
It includes a travelling exhibition, a book and feature-length documentary, which was premiered last year in Canada and goes on theatrical release in the US next week.
Watch the video here.
Read MoreBy Peter Carbonera | Newsweek
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch is a documentary film by Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier that paints a beautiful and terrifying picture of what human beings are doing to the Earth.
Since the early 1980s Burtynsky, a Canadian photographer, has been documenting what he calls "intentional landscapes," the big and lasting marks that human activities like mining and farming are making on the planet. The film is the third collaboration between Burtynsky and documentary filmmakers Baichwal and de Pencier—the first was Manufactured Landscapes (2006) followed by Watermark (2013)—and is a companion to a coffee-table book of large photographs and a touring museum exhibit. The documentary opened in the United States on September 25.
The title comes from a word used by some geologists to describe the period of natural history we are all living in right now. It was popularized by Paul Crutzen, a Dutch Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist who has studied climate change. During the 1980s, Burtynsky says, Crutzen realized, "We as a species have for the first time been such a force on the planet that we have moved it from one geological epoch to another. We have now created a footprint that has left its signature in the future strata of the planet so geologists a million years from now if they dig something up they'll say, 'This is from the anthropocene, when humans on the planet were the dominant species.'"
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Nicolò Gallio
When was the last time you felt mesmerised and guilty at the same time, while looking at a piece of art? It happened to me last Saturday more than once when I was visiting the Anthropocene exhibition at the MAST Foundation in Bologna. I knew I was going to experience an impactful show given the topics – pollution, deforestation, mining, climate change, urbanization – but did not fully realise the beauty that came across the powerful images captured by the cameras of world-renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky and award-winning directors/producers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreCBC Ideas
In Paul Kennedy's final week at IDEAS, he looks back at his four decades with the program. We begin the series with an episode inspired by the Muskoka Summit on the Environment, an event Paul has moderated since 2010.
Paul has long had a passion for stories about the environment. Having grown up in St. Catharines, Ontario. he saw firsthand the impact of industry on the surrounding landscape.
For this program, Paul invited three guests to join him on stage for a live event at the Glenn Gould — photographer Ed Burtynsky, microbiologist Nadia Mykytczuk, and Henry Lickers, Environmental Science Officer for the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne.
Paul asked the panel two basic questions about our collective future: are we doomed? And what inspires hope?
Listen to the full episode here.
Read MoreBy Jonathan Lambert and Rebecca Ellis
NPR
Humans have made an indelible mark on the planet. Since the mid-20th century, we've accelerated the digging of mines, construction of dams, expansion of cities and clearing of forests for agriculture — activity that will be visible in the geological record for eons to come.
Some scientists are calling it the Anthropocene era, or the age of the humans ("anthropos" is Greek for human).
Photographer Edward Burtynsky and filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier were inspired by this ongoing discussion of the debate over this new geological era. These three Canadian artists traveled to 22 countries to research and document "places of obvious, physical human incursions on the landscape," says filmmaker de Pencier.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Steven Threndyle
Montecristo Magazine
In an elevator inside downtown Vancouver’s Telus Garden, a news item flashes on the TV. “WWF says 60 per cent of the world’s wildlife has been wiped out since 1970.” It is apt timing for such a fact, as just minutes before, renowned Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky had participated in a Nature Conservancy of Canada panel discussion within this building’s walls, and shown stirring images from his latest project: a collaboration with Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier called Anthropocene.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreAnthropocene (Goose Lane Editions, 2018) is the winner of Outstanding Achievement in Research in the art category by the Canadian Museums Association. The award, presented in Toronto on April 17th at the AMA’s 2019 National Conference, was the latest honour for the book, film and gallery project, which was deemed by judges as “nationally significant and exceeded the current standard of practice by going beyond the conventional approach.”
In Anthropocene, Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal, and Nicholas de Pencier, chronicles the massive and irreversible impact of humans on the Earth — on a geological scale.
Read the full announcement here.
Read MoreBy Katriina Etholén
I have here on my table the latest book by the Toronto based photographer Edward Burtynsky. The scale of the book is impressive – three kilos, 36 by 29 centimetres and 236 pages. But it’s not just the book’s size that is impressive; the theme is vast as well. It was while viewing the wondrous photographs on the walls of the Flowers Gallery in London that I decided that I needed to familiarize myself better with his current Anthropocene project and the book with the same name.
This is not the first time I have explored Burtynsky’s work. I had the privilege of meeting and interviewing him in the spring 2011 in Stockholm, just before the opening the exhibition Burtynsky: Oil in Fotografiska. I wrote two articles about him, one to go together with the oil exhibition and other one describing his large-scale project concentrating on water that he was working on at the time.
Edward Burtynsky is one of Canada’s most significant contemporary photographers. He has won multiple prestigious awards for his work and is known for his large colour photos of man-made landscapes. His projects are deep studies of the subjects, usually lasting several years. He has shown the scars and wounds that man has cut on the earth and completed vast projects on oil and water, the liquids that fuel and sustain our everyday life. His diverse body of work includes mines and quarries – which have followed him from early projects to this latest one – salt pans and ship breaking yards, railcuts and container ports, homesteads, consumerism, recycling and so on. Anthropocene is his thirteenth book and is part of a larger project.
Read the full review here.
Read MoreBy Greg Morrison
Sotheby’s Museum Network
“We cannot take action together on something we don’t discuss,” says Miranda Massie, director of New York’s Climate Museum. She’s referring to the fact that although 65% of Americans purport to be anxious about climate change, only about 5% speak about it.
Her institution, founded in 2015, is working to change that through art and culture. It is the only dedicated climate-change institution in the world, and so far has hosted exhibitions and events in temporary and public spaces across the city. But the museum is currently without a permanent home – a status that reflects how its necessity has only recently been understood, and how the discussion of climate change is only now taking its place at the heart of the cultural world.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Holly Hughes
PDNOnline
Edward Burtynsky thinks big. Since the 1980s, he has been making large-format images of the extraction and exploitation of natural resources and the impact of these vast operations on the environment. His latest project is his most ambitious to date. In two exhibitions on view now at the National Gallery of Canada in Toronto and the Art Gallery of Ontario, a new book being published by Steidl, and two gallery shows opening in New York City in November, Burtynsky invites viewers to consider the subject of geological time. The title of the project, “Anthropocene,” comes from the name used to describe what, after extensive research, some scientists argue is a new geological epoch, in which dramatic changes to the Earth have been created not by a giant meteor, but by human activity.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Matthew Rudman
Studio International
In July 2017, construction workers were digging the foundations for a new fire and police station in the town of Thornton, Colorado, when they uncovered something unexpected: the fossilised remains of a triceratops dating back 66m years. “A lot of times these will be ploughed up and they won’t be recognised,” the curator of a local natural history museum said. Humans have been manipulating the natural world since the dawn of civilisation, but the past 100 years has seen an exponential and uncontrolled increase in disruption and destruction of delicately balanced ecosystems and geologies previously undisturbed for millions of years. We are all-too familiar with the consequences: crumbling ice caps, bleached coral reefs and rising sea levels threatening to engulf our settlements with acidified water.
In the mid-20th century, hundreds of atmospheric nuclear weapons tests were conducted, coating the Earth in a thin layer of radioactive particles. Many scientists are proposing using this layer of toxic dust as the indelible signature of a new geological age, the Anthropocene, an era defined by the impact of humanity on the Earth’s ecology. Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky (b1955) has long been preoccupied with the troubled intersection of human industry and natural ecosystems, and his most recent output, The Human Signature, on show at the Flowers Gallery, London, is part of his recently launched Anthropocene project, which explores the various manifestations of human mark-making on our planet.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Ari Stein
52 Insights Magazine
He’s spent most of his career unravelling this thread of human destruction, so much so we now have a word for it, The Anthropocene.
As a photographer he seeks to capture scenes of environmental devastation to educate and inspire us into action, the question constantly arising throughout his work is how did we get to this point? This is a pertinent question that motivates Edward to climb, rail and ascend some of the worlds farthest reaching places. Deploying his arsenal of drones, helicopters and assistants, he magically converts man-altered landscapes into images of sublime beauty.
What the world has gained from Burtynsky’s shock and awe images is the ability to piece together our every day withdrawal from the earth and put it into a whole new perspective. There is no doubt that our earth is experiencing a tipping point but only through the work of people like Edward Burtynsky can we be truly aware of what we are doing. In this exclusive interview, we sit down with Edward to ask not only how 35 years of shooting have changed him as a person but what has he learnt from doing it.
Read the interview here.
Read More