NEWS HUB

Edward Burtynsky shares Sony World Photography Award honour with Ukraine’s photographers

By Kate Taylor
The Globe and Mail

“Photography embodies truth in a way that transcends language, culture, borders, and time. In the face of fake news and Putin’s vicious disinformation campaign, Ukrainian photographers are using this moment to show the world the truth.

“Their dedication to their art, even as their towns are surrounded by invading Russian forces bringing terror to their doorsteps, is a bravery that humbles me.

“Photography is about light conquering darkness. And as we speak, Ukrainian photographers are conquering an unimaginable form of darkness. I can think of no more outstanding contribution to photography than that.”

Read the article here.

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Standing Whale: Edward Burtynsky’s Collaborations with Queen’s

Campus Beat!
CFRC

Welcome back to another great edition of Campus Beat! On January 18th 2022, Queen’s University announced a new creative partnership with world-renowned Canadian photographer, and Queen’s Honorary Doctorate recipient (2007), Edward Burtynsky to help realize his new public art piece titled Standing Whale.

Listen to the full podcast episode here.

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Edward Burtynsky’s Local Perspective

By Roger Klein
On the Bay Magazine

Documenting the Human Epoch

He’s photographed rare coral reefs off the coast of Komodo Island, Indonesia. He’s documented environmental destruction from the nickel mines of Sudbury to the largest ivory burn in Africa’s history. Now Edward Burtynsky wants the people of Georgian Bay to know they live in one of the most naturally beautiful places on earth. And it’s worth protecting.

Read the full article here.

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Photographer Edward Burtynsky on Creating Immersive Experiences and How to Find Your Aesthetic Voice in a World Flooded with Images

By Kate Brown
Artnet

Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky is sort of like a sleuth: He produces evidence of humans’ impact on the planet. Gaining access to hard-to-reach places in our world—tar sands, nickel mines, sawmills, or shipyards—Burtynsky culls poignant imagery to show us how we have transformed the earth around us at a vast and debilitating scale. There is a cost to modern life and its massive, if usually just out of view.

At a time when the climate is finally starting to rear from the effects of industry, his work has become even more urgent. It is no great surprise then the artist, who is based in Toronto, was recently awarded this year’s Outstanding Contribution to Photography by the World Photography Organization. His work will be on view at the 2022 Sony World Photography Awards exhibition at Somerset House in London beginning April 15, 2022.

Read the full article here.

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'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?'"

Read the article and listen to the episode here.

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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.

Read the full article here.

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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.

Read the full announcement here.

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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.

Read the full interview here.

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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.

Read the full article here.

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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.

Read the full article here.

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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.

Read the full article here.

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Edward Burtynsky, Director X among artists in Luminato Festival Toronto lineup

By Victoria Ahearn
Toronto Star

TORONTO - Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, filmmaker Director X and theatre artist Christine Brubaker are among the artists set to present original works at the Luminato Festival Toronto this fall.

The three will headline the annual arts and culture event, which will feature free film and digital experiences and a drive-in concert Oct. 13 to 17.

Read the full article here.

More on In the Wake of Progress here.

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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.

Listen to the episode here.

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