By Ellyn Kail
Feature Shoot
In his new book, Edward Burtynsky recalls photographing oil bunkering sites in Nigeria’s Niger Delta as a “transformative moment of consciousness”—one that demonstrated the true scope of the wounds we inflict on our planet. With refineries spread out across the land, swaths of the environment have been drenched in oil. As the photographer leaned out of a helicopter to take in the scene, surreal colors spread out before him, as far as the eye could see.
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Read MoreBy Cecilia Pavone
Artribune
Costruire un nuovo ethos ecologico attraverso la testimonianza e la documentazione dei disastri ambientali provocati dall’azione antropica, per contrastare la crisi dell’abitare umano sulla Terra nell’era globalizzata dell’Antropocene. È questo il fulcro tematico dell’opera del canadese Edward Burtynsky (St. Catharines, 1955), fotografo di livello internazionale che ha vinto la XXV edizione del Premio Pascali con la mostra Xylella Studies, al Museo Castromediano di Lecce.Costruire un nuovo ethos ecologico attraverso la testimonianza e la documentazione dei disastri ambientali provocati dall’azione antropica, per contrastare la crisi dell’abitare umano sulla Terra nell’era globalizzata dell’Antropocene. È questo il fulcro tematico dell’opera del canadese Edward Burtynsky (St. Catharines, 1955), fotografo di livello internazionale che ha vinto la XXV edizione del Premio Pascali con la mostra Xylella Studies, al Museo Castromediano di Lecce.
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Read MoreGalleries West
The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University will digitize 25,000 press photographs of Canadian events, speeding the normally laborious work with an innovative machine developed by Toronto photographer Edward Burtynsky.
Burtynsky says a vast array of stunning photographs at various institutions languish in dark boxes in temperature-controlled storage with no public access.
"It's a thrill to finally be able to initiate an effective and innovative solution to this problem and bring this important photographic history into the light," he says.
Burtynsky has assembled a team of hardware and software developers to digitize the images with his equipment, known as ARKIV360, along with their folded captions, tear sheets and attached ephemera.
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Read MoreThe Image Centre
Toronto Metropolitan University
Innovative ARKIV360 machine, developed by famed photographer Edward Burtynsky, will be used to scan The Image Centre’s Rudolph P. Bratty Family Collection and make it accessible in an online database.
Toronto, ON – The Image Centre (IMC) at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) is pleased to announce that the Department of Canadian Heritage has granted over $300,000 to support the digitization of the IMC’s Rudolf P. Bratty Family Collection of press photographs drawn from the New York Times Photo Archive.
This funding was issued through the Digital Access to Heritage component of the Museums Assistance Program (MAP), which provides support to heritage organizations to digitize collections, develop digital content and build their capacity in these areas.
Read the full announcement here.
Read MoreBy Larry Humber
The Art Newspaper
A trove of Inuit art—some 89,000 drawings in all—was created in Cape Dorset (now Kinngait) near the southern tip of Baffin Island between 1950 and 1980, providing a way for the community in Canada’s remote Nunavut territory to generate income. But very few of those works have seen the light of day through the issuing of limited-edition prints, with the Toronto market very much in mind.
After a devastating fire destroyed a similar archive in a nearby Arctic community, the Ontario-based McMichael Canadian Art Collection moved to acquire the Cape Dorset drawings in 1990, giving them a secure home. “Inuit art was always folded into our national identity,” says Sarah Milroy, the McMichael’s chief curator, making the acquisition an obvious move.
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Read MoreBy Gaia Vince
BBC Culture
Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky discusses his startling and unexpectedly sublime photos – 'an extended lament for the loss of nature' – with Gaia Vince.
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Read MoreBy Erica Ackerberg
NYT Book Review
The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky’s remarkable, large-scale images offer a painterly view of man-made infrastructure around the world, from quarries in Portugal to rice fields in China to oil refineries in California. His new book, AFRICAN STUDIES (Steidl, $95), focuses on a region he calls globalism’s “final stop”: sub-Saharan Africa. Capturing the impact of industrialization on the landscapes of Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Ethiopia and more from high above — from airplanes, helicopters and drones — Burtynsky’s camera documents in stunning detail and vibrant hues the toll of human intervention on our planet, from salt and sapphire mining to plastics recycling and dams. This book is both “a cautionary tale,” he says, and a reminder that this continent “still possesses some of the greatest natural reserves in the world.”\
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Read MoreNYC-ARTS
A profile of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, known for his large format photographs of industrial landscapes. His work integrates critical reporting with visual aesthetics, bearing witness to the impact of humans on the planet.
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Read MoreBy Elyssa Goodman
Blind Magazine
At first glance, Edward Burtynsky’s “African Studies” exhibition at the Howard Greenberg Gallery is a majestic geometry of colors and shapes, all with roots in art history.
The salt ponds of Senegal have traces of Gustav Klimt, sewn together mosaic-like near the towns of Tikat Banguel and Fatick. A view from above the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam recalls M.C. Escher’s famed staircases. In the coal tailings of South Africa, the plume of an Erte ensemble and the distressed rivulets of a Jackson Pollock. But a closer look, a closer read, reveals the startling nature of what Burtynsky calls “business as usual.”
“African Studies” is currently on view in two New York galleries: at Howard Greenberg until April 22 and at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery until April 1. It was also released as a monograph by Steidl at the end of last year. It is a continuation of Burtynsky’s travels across the globe, capturing modern landscapes both touched and untouched by human hands, some more virulently than others.
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Read MoreBy Saffron Ward
Aesthetica Magazine
In November 2022, the world’s population hit 8 billion – a staggering milestone. Although the growth rate is slowing, the resources needed to support human life remain out of reach. Approximately 1.75 Earths are needed to sustain current activity. Therefore, the natural world has been morphing into something altogether different for centuries. In 2019, the United Nation’s global assessment report stated that 75% of ice-free land has been significantly changed by society, from agriculture to housing and industry. This “terrible beauty” is the subject of Edward Burtynsky’s (b. 1955) large-scale photographic works.
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Read MoreBy Grace Ebert
Colossal
Renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky approaches his latest project with curiosity about the future of human impact and globalization. From the diamond mines of South Africa to the richly textured landscape of Namibia’s Tsaus Mountains, African Studies spotlights the sub-Saharan region and its reserves of metals, salt, precious gemstones, and other ores. “I am surveying two very distinct aspects of the landscape,” he says in a statement, “that of the earth as something intact, undisturbed yet implicitly vulnerable… and that of the earth as opened up by the systematic extraction of resources.”
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Read MoreBy Mary Harper
BBC News Africa
For the past 40 years, Edward Burtynsky has photographed the impact of human industry on the planet and for his latest collection, African Studies, he travelled across the continent taking photos from above. He spoke to the BBC's Mary Harper.
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Read MoreBy Mark Feeney
Boston Globe
NEW BRITAIN, Conn. — By the numbers, “Edward Burtynsky: Earth Observed” is a small show, with just 31 photographs. There’s also a nine-minute video showing Burtynsky at work. That’s it. Yet in ways that matter more than the merely numerical — sweep, scale, ambition, urgency — it has the heft, and impact, of a much larger show.
“Edward Burtynsky: Earth Observed,” which runs through April 16 at the New Britain Museum of American Art, might be seen as a stripped-down Burtynsky career retrospective. It proceeds in roughly chronological order, with the earliest photograph from 1985, and the most recent from 2016. Five continents are represented, with only Antarctica and South America missing.
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Read MoreBy Wendy Stueck
The Globe and Mail
For decades, Edward Burtynsky has created images that show how humans affect the natural world – turning the gritty, unglamourous details of mines, dams, shipyards and factories into haunting works that call on all of us to think about our impact on the planet.
A winner of multiple prestigious awards, the photographer has collaborated with other artists to document the impact of climate change through works including In the Wake of Progress. A multi-media project, that piece premiered at the Luminato Festival in June on advertising screens at Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square. Mr. Burtynsky is also one of three artists behind The Anthropocene Project, a multi-media work that investigates the impacts of humans on earth.
In December, the Canadian Journalism Foundation launched the Edward Burtynsky Award for Climate Photojournalism. The competition is open to Canadian professionals employed by, or freelancing for, domestic news outlets. The deadline for submissions is Jan. 20, 2023, with a $5,000 prize for the winner.
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Read MoreQueen’s University Arts and Science
Opening event unveils the possibility of what Standing Whale could bring to Queen’s University
Standing Whale might just be a concept, the vision of Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky, but the excitement was palpable at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre last week.
Based on the story of a pod of North Atlantic Blue Whales that perished in an ice event off the coast of Newfoundland in 2014, Standing Whale is a thematic continuation of Burtynsky’s 40-year artistic practice looking at the impacts of humans on the planet. Intended to be a true-to-size, 75-foot artistic re-imagining inspired by the retrieved skeletons that washed ashore in 2014, Standing Whale is an acknowledgement to the power of telling our human stories, only this time as a three-dimensional sculpture rather than a two-dimensional image.
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Read MoreNational Geographic Italia
By Carlo Andriani
In collaborazione con Fondazione Sylva, il fotografo Edward Burtynsky presenta al Festival delle Scienze di Roma la mostra dedicata alla distruzione del patrimonio arboreo millenario causata dal batterio “Xylella fastidiosa".
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Read MoreBy Karena Walter
St. Catharines Standard
World renowned photographer and St. Catharines native Edward Burtynsky wants to transform a 180,000-pound metal forge at the former General Motors plant on Ontario Street into a major public artwork for the city.
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Read MoreBy Gege Li
New Scientist
These arresting images of industrial developments in Senegal, South Africa and Namibia were taken by Edward Burtynsky, who spent four years capturing African landscapes using aerial photography.
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Read MoreDaniel Browning
The Art Show | ABC Radio National
Edward Burtynsky is a Canadian-Ukrainian photographer who captures human activity on Earth that's normally too big to perceive, except through aerial photography.
His scenes of rapid industrialisation and large-scale pollution characterise the Anthropocene, the idea that we are in the age of man-made environmental crisis. So how does he pick his monumental subjects? And what has he witnessed over his 40-year career?
Listen to the episode here.
Read MoreBy Neha Kale
The Saturday Paper
Caspar David Friedrich’s unsettling vision of the sublime is a key inspiration for Edward Burtynsky’s chronicles of human destruction of the natural world.
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