NEWS HUB

'The planet is finite': Edward Burtynsky on bearing witness to our impact on the world

CBC 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?'"

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Edward Burtynsky, Who Captures Reality of Environmental Disaster, Recognized for “Outstanding Contribution to Photography”

By 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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The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York acquires photograph by Edward Burtynsky

The 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.

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TL Insider Artist-In-Residence Q&A with Edward Burtynsky

By 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.

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Single-use Plastic Bottle Waste the Focus of New Multi-Media Exhibit

By 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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Edward Burtynsky: Tales of Water

By 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.

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Tracing the Human Footprint

By 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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Naya with Edward Burtynsky

Work/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.

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Earth Day: Anthropocene

By 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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Eight leading artists championing sustainability

Christie’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.

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Ryerson acquires Edward Burtynsky photo collection

By 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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Interview with Edward Burtynsky | From the Mundane World: Launch Exhibition of He Art Museum

HE 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.

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How an assignment at Ryerson inspired Edward Burtynsky's jaw-dropping industrial landscapes

CBC Radio - As it Happens

Edward Burtynsky sees the world from a different vantage point than most of us — quite literally. The St. Catharines, Ont.-born photographer has spent decades taking bird's-eye-view shots of tailings ponds, sawmills, potash mines, and garbage dumps.

But long before those shots from the air, he was taking photographs at ground level in Toronto as a student at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, now Ryerson University. This week, Burtynsky gifted 142 of those early photographs to his alma mater.

It's the first instalment of his multi-year donation to Ryerson, where he began his career in the late 1970s.

He spoke to As It Happens host Carol Off about how a school assignment at Ryerson got him hooked on capturing how humans were bending nature to their needs. Here's part of their conversation.

Listen to the full segment here.

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Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky to donate archives to Ryerson University

By Kate Taylor
The Globe & Mail

Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky is donating his archives to his old school, including even his student assignments. The Ryerson Image Centre announced Tuesday that the celebrated photographer is making a multiyear gift to the institution where he began his career in the 1970s, studying at the School of Image Arts at what is now Ryerson University. The gift will be made in several chronological parcels. The first part features 142 images made between 1976 and 1989, most not represented in public collections. These include early photographs of landscapes and city scenes submitted to his Ryerson photography instructors before Burtynsky achieved renown as a photographer of large-scale industrial landscapes. Later photographs of architecture and manufacturing include this image Holland Marsh, Ontario from the series Packing.

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Visionary Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky gifts career-spanning archive to the Ryerson Image Centre

November 24, 2020, Toronto — The Ryerson Image Centre (RIC) is proud to announce a multi-year donation of photographs by celebrated Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose iconic images have brought worldwide attention to the impacts of human industry on the natural landscape. The first installment of this gift comprises 142 photographs from the artist’s early career, a selection of which have been made public in a virtual gallery on the RIC’s website. Subsequent annual gifts will make the Toronto-based photography centre the most important global repository for the study of Burtynsky’s oeuvre.

Edward Burtynsky began his career in the late 1970s at the School of Image Arts of Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Ryerson University). "It was important to me that my life’s work be housed in a Canadian institution, and it felt like a fitting 'homecoming' to entrust these works to the same place where I first developed as a photographer,” Burtynsky says. “The Ryerson Image Centre has become one of the leading museums in the world for photo historical research and has a growing collection of artist archives. I realized that there was no place I would rather have my work preserved and studied.”

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Famed Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky donates his archives to Ryerson: ‘My work is a chronicle of how we’re transforming the land and bending it to our needs’

By Sue Carter
Toronto Star

Edward Burtynsky gifting his archives to the Ryerson Image Centre marks a circular journey for one of the world’s most esteemed contemporary photographers.

The downtown university has just announced the first instalment of his multi-year donation to its photographic gallery and research facility. It features 142 photos from Burtynsky’s early career, created between 1976 and 1989. Subsequent annual donations, to span three to five years, will add more chronological works from his five-plus decades of visually documenting how so-called human progress and industrial spread have environmentally devastated the planet.

As a young student from nearby suburban St. Catharines, Burtynsky was exposed to groundbreaking ideas at the School of Image Arts at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Ryerson University) in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Along with art classes, Burtynsky studied sociology, psychology and film. He felt encouraged to take risks with his photography, thanks to energized faculty members such as Marta Braun, whom he credits with teaching him art history.

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