‘74PODCAST
“To me, as an artist, engagement with art is the first step to communication.” – Edward Burtynsky
In this episode, Founder and Director of the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery Bryce Wolkowitz, and Environmental Photographer Edward Burtynsky discuss his early inspirations, his first darkroom experience, the composition within the frame, current state of the art institutions, as well as his latest project "Natural Order."
Listen to the episode on:
Read MoreRBC 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
By 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
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 More
OTTAWA, Nov. 13, 2019 /CNW/ - Many students are unaware that common, everyday activities place a demand on the natural world: from buying and consuming food, to throwing out plastic waste in the trash, to purchasing fast fashion clothing containing hidden plastics, and more. As concerns mount about the impacts of a growing human population, coupled with the increasing amount of land set aside for dumping sites, students need to learn now more than ever how their lifestyle choices have the ability to change the world they live in. To support this environmental learning, The Anthropocene Project (TAP), and Canadian Geographic Education (Can Geo Education), have partnered to create a travelling, classroom-focused educational initiative called the Anthropocene Education Program (AEP). The Program will explore the complex issues of plastic consumption, waste and pollution, land use management, species extinction and climate change.
Read the full press release here.
Read MoreBy Gabriella Golenda
Metropolis Magazine
In the exhibition Anthropocene, there are aerial photos of a snow-dusted open-pit coal mine in Wyoming, a sawmill cutting its way through deteriorating lowland rainforests of Nigeria, and heliostat mirrors in a sublime formation at a solar plant in Spain. Sinister yet strangely beautiful, these obscure scenes lend us a view that we might not otherwise have: a vantage point to start to understand how profoundly the planet has been altered by humans.
As the story goes, Anthropocene, which opened May 16 in Bologna, Italy, is the result of a collaboration that began in 2014 with three Canadian artists: photographer Edward Burtynsky, and filmmakers Jennifer Biachwal and Nicolas de Penciler, and was first shown at the National Gallery of Canada. The trio spent the years leading up to the exhibit trying to answer a prompt now written in the introduction of the exhibition catalogue: “…how to give compelling aesthetic form to the evidence that has aggregated in the geological record through persistent and globally interconnected human activity.” This work closely follows the research of an international group of scientists, the Anthropocene Working Group, who are investigating the effect of human incursions, that, in their own words, are so immense in their scope that they will “endure geological time.”
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Brooke Shuman
Huffington Post
“Anthropocene: The Human Epoch,” a documentary by filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and photographer Edward Burtynsky, is a nature story gone awry, a dazzling and at times nauseating document of the far-reaching, and possibly catastrophic, impact that humans have had on the planet.
The film gets its title from the geological term “Anthropocene,” which was first coined in 2000 by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and ecologist Eugene Stoermer. In 2016, a group of geologists called the Anthropocene Working Group proposed that our planet has recently been so drastically altered by human activity that we are now living in a distinct geological era. (That’s why it’s called the Anthro-pocene, because humans made it.) Humans had been getting by in the Holocene epoch for 11,000 years since the last glacial age, but the Anthropocene Working Group claims that through farming, industrialization, massive excavation of minerals and the dumping of ton after ton of trash, we’ve created a new geological era.
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 Laura Leavitt
Hyperallergic
The cult film Koyaanisqatsi, named after the Hopi idea of “life lived out of balance,” contains no dialogue, but rather scenes all over the world — of cities, nature, the tiniest industrially produced products, and the vastness of canyons. It’s experienced more as a guided meditation than a linear story. I thought of it when watching the new documentary Anthropocene: The Human Epoch. It follows the research of the Anthropocene Working Group, whose members believe that the Holocene geological epoch concluded around the middle of the 20th century. In its place is the Anthropocene, characterized by the way that humans shape Earth’s landscapes.
Read the full article here.
By 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 MoreThat Moment When
PBS NewsHour
A wrong turn turned into a moment of revelation for Edward Burtynsky, the photographer tells Steve Goldbloom.
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