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As It Happens
When Edward Burtynsky was honoured for his contribution to photography on Tuesday, he decided to share the spotlight with Ukrainians who are documenting the war with their cameras.
Burtynsky, a Canadian photographer of Ukrainian descent, won the prize for outstanding contribution to photography at the Sony World Photography Awards in London.
Read the Q&A and listen to the episode here.
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Edward Burtynsky sees the world from a different vantage point than most of us — quite literally. The St. Catharines, Ont.-born photographer has spent decades taking bird's-eye-view shots of tailings ponds, sawmills, potash mines, and garbage dumps.
But long before those shots from the air, he was taking photographs at ground level in Toronto as a student at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, now Ryerson University. This week, Burtynsky gifted 142 of those early photographs to his alma mater.
It's the first instalment of his multi-year donation to Ryerson, where he began his career in the late 1970s.
He spoke to As It Happens host Carol Off about how a school assignment at Ryerson got him hooked on capturing how humans were bending nature to their needs. Here's part of their conversation.
Listen to the full segment here.
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