By Daniel Stone
National Geographic
Since sometime between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, an era generally known as the Bronze Age, humans have been remarkably adept at identifying precious resources and ripping them from the Earth.
For a while, working with bronze or gold or copper meant working with your hands, and with only as much of it as one person could handle. But the 20th century, followed by the 21st, brought marvelous new ways to exploit Earth's elements, namely with industrial beasts that could tear apart landscapes with terrific volume and speed.
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Read MoreBy Raffi Khatchadourian
The New Yorker
Our helicopter was heading over the Niger Delta, across a vast and unstable sky, with gray clouds surging above. I was sitting behind the pilot, and behind me, gazing out a starboard window, was Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian photographer known for his sweeping images of industrial projects and their effects on the environment. For three decades, he has been documenting colossal mines, quarries, dams, roadways, factories, and trash piles—telling a story, frame by frame, of a planet reshaped by human ambition. For one seminal project, sixteen years ago, he travelled to Bangladesh to shoot decommissioned oil tankers that were being ripped apart by barefoot men with cutting torches. Those images of monumental debris—angular masses that appear to emerge from sediment like alien geology—remain transfixing. Carefully choreographed, shot in hazy and ethereal light, they echo the sublime power of a Turner landscape even as they portray a reckoning with garbage.
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Read MoreCBC Radio - The Sunday Edition
Edward Burtynsky's art is awesome. In the old-fashioned sense of the word … to wit, capable of inspiring awe in its beholder.
His huge photos of dams, mines, quarries, oil refineries, shipbreaking, irrigation and oil sands operations capture landscapes altered on a mind-boggling scale … dwarfing the humans and machines that create them and work inside them.
Burtynsky, though, is not simply a photographer of scale. His lens is attuned to the compelling symmetries of massive industrial sites, the striking, unexpected slashes of colour in rivers of mining tailings and the precise patterns of new cars fanning across a sprawling parking lot.
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Read MoreBy Brian Bethune
Maclean's Magazine
One of Canada’s finest photographers considers his craft—and the relationship between his art and the truth—for a retrospective book.
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Read MoreBy Robert Shore
Elephant Magazine
‘I’m looking at humans and what they’re doing to the planet as if I were an alien’: beauty and terror blend in Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky’s industrial landscapes, which bear seductively powerful witness to the ways in which we are irrevocably changing our world. Robert Shore meets the great documenter of the Anthropocene.
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Read MoreBBC Radio 3 - Free Thinking
Large-scale photographs showing the impact of humans on urban and natural environments are discussed by Canadian artist and 2005 TED prize winner Edward Burtynsky. Ella Hickson's new play Oil, directed by Carrie Cracknell, explores the politics of this natural resource from 1889 to present day. She's in conversation with Joe Douglas, director of a Dundee Rep production of John McGrath's drama The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil which is on tour this autumn. Plus, presenter Philip Dodd is joined by analysts Peter Atherton and Jeremy Leggett to consider how we meet energy demands in the face of climate change and a rapidly rising global population.
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Read MoreBy Oliver Wainwright
The Guardian
The great photographer’s awesome images – taken from drones, propellor planes and a 50ft selfie stick – show how industry has drilled and drained our planet.
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Read MoreBy Stephen Wallis
The Wall Street Journal
In a world distracted by small-screen snapshots and selfies, two eminent photographers are proving that large-scale environmental images are not only relevant but also vital.
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Read MoreBy Richard Assheton
AnOther Magazine
"My work has never been about pitting heroes against villains. It’s about awareness." As his new retrospective exhibition launches, AnOther sits down with image-maker Edward Burtynsky.
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Read MoreBy Alistair Sooke
The Telegraph
Ahead of a new exhibition of his work, the Canadian photographer tells Alastair Sooke about the toxic allure of the world's most perilous places.
‘I’ve been to China a dozen times,” says the 61-year-old landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky, “but I’ve never visited the Great Wall.” He smiles. “I don’t go to tourist places. I enter into worlds behind chain-link fences and barbed wire.”
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Read MoreBy Lynn Trimble
Phoenix New Times
Due in part to a particularly robust lineup of local gallery exhibitions for July’s First and Third Friday art walks in downtown Phoenix, there was an abundance of great art on view during July 2016. We saw plenty of great art outside of Phoenix, too – especially in East Valley cities including Chandler and Mesa. But 10 works, pictured here, stood out from all the rest.
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Read MoreBy Laurence Butet-Roch
Vice
We talked to the 'Manufactured Landscapes' photographer about Kenya's ivory burn, Fort McMurray wildfires, and the impact of 3D printing.
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Read MoreThe Globe and Mail
What a difference a book makes.
Edward Burtynsky was an established Canadian photographer who didn’t have much in the way of an international profile. Then along came the publication, in 2003, of Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky, tied in with his touring National Gallery of Canada exhibition. When the book, co-published by the National Gallery and Yale University Press, landed on shelves in major bookstores and museums around the world, the St. Catharines, Ont., native immediately felt the impact.
“All of a sudden I was getting calls from Europe. I was getting calls from the States,” Mr. Burtynsky recalls. “They were all saying, ‘This is really interesting and important work. How did I not know about you?’ ”
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Read MoreBy Liz Logan
Introspective Magazine
With his gorgeous aerial photographs — now on view at Norfolk, Virginia's Chrysler Museum of Art — the Canadian photographer makes a powerful plea for the conservation of our most vital natural resource.
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Read MoreBy Michael Agresta
Texas Observer
There’s a moment halfway through Manufactured Landscapes, a 2006 documentary about Edward Burtynsky, when the celebrated Canadian photographer tries to talk his way into an industrial site in Tianjin, China. The smog outside lies thick and foreboding; the media flack seems to sense that it will cast the company in a negative light. “It’s very dirty,” she tells Burtynsky. “I don’t think it’s a good day to make beautiful pictures.” Burtynsky’s translator tries to convince her: “But through his camera lens, through his eyes, it will appear beautiful.”
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Read MoreCBC News
Renowned Toronto photographer Edward Burtynsky has decided to take his Governor General's Award prize money and give it all away.
Burtynsky was honoured by the Canada Council on Monday for his work promoting environmentalism through global industrial landscape photography — and now he wants to help others promote their own unique artistic visions.That's why he's turning the $25,000 financial portion of the award into an annual grant to help emerging Canadian photographers create and publish their first photography books.
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Read MoreBy Anthi Rozi
Archisearch
Edward Burtynsky was born in 1955 in Ontario Canada. He received his BAA in Photography / Media Studies from Ryerson University in 1982 and in 1985 founded Toronto Image Works. Early exposure to the sites of the General Motors plant in his hometown helped to formulate the development of his photographic work. His imagery explores the collective impact we as a species are having on the surface of the planet; an inspection of the human systems we`ve imposed onto natural landscapes.
His photographic depictions of global industrial landscapes are included in the collections of over sixty major museums around the world. As an active lecturer on photographic art, Burtynsky`s speaking engagements have been held at the National Gallery of Canada, the Library of Congress in Washington, the TED conferences, among others. His images appear in numerous periodicals each year including National Geographic, the New York Times, The Smithsonian Magazine. Among his distinctions are the TED Prize, The Outreach award at the Rencontres d`Arles, the Roloff Beny Book Award. In 2006 he was awarded the title of Officer of the Order of Canada. His work is represented by numerous galleries internationally.
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Read MoreBy Tyler Green
The Modern Art Notes Podcast
Edward Burtynsky is one of North America’s most important photographers. In bodies of work such as “China,” and “Oil,” Burtynsky has conducted sustained examinations of mankind’s use of the planet’s natural resources and of the ways industry has transformed nature. His work has been the subject of dozens of major museum exhibitions around the world, including at the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
Burtynsky’s most recent show, “Water,” features nearly five dozen works mostly examining the ways in which human societies have re-made the natural environment in an effort to use water. The show originated at the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans and was curated by Russell Lord. The book that accompanies the exhibition is published by Steidl. “Water” is on view at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Va. through May 15.
Air date: Feburary 18, 2016.
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Read MoreArtfix Daily
Explore humanity’s complicated relationship with our most precious natural resource through the lens of internationally renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky. The Chrysler Museum of Art’s winter/spring keynote exhibition, Edward Burtynsky: Water, includes more than 60 large-scale color photographs that form a global portrait of the intricate intersections of humanity and our most precious natural resource. The exhibition, organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art, will open to the public on Feb. 12 and run through May 15. Admission is free.
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Read MoreBy Enrica Vigano
The Eye of Photography
L’exposition Acqua Shock explore la relation controversée entre l’humanité et l’eau : liquide le plus précieux, ressource essentielle pour la vie, une partie essentielle de notre corps et de la planète.
Entre 2009 et 2014, Edward Burtynsky a voyagé sur cinq continents – depuis le Golfe du Mexique jusqu’aux rives du Gange – pour capter le cycle de vie de l’eau. Il a suivi le cours des rivières et a étudié les mers ; il a décrit les différents usages de l’eau, du culte jusqu’à l’agriculture et une fois de plus, comme à son habitude, il a scruté ce qui se passe sous la surface des choses.
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