NEWS HUB

The beauty and the horror in Edward Burtynsky's photographs

CBC 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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Energy and Landscape: Edward Burtynsky, Ella Hickson

BBC 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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