NEWS HUB

How Edward Burtynsky's industry roots shape his perspective on art

CBC The Sunday Magazine with Piya Chattopadhyay

After more than 40 years photographing the industrial sublime around the world, Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky's new project brings him home to St. Catharines, Ont. He's taking an abandoned relic – a 68,000-kilogram sheet metal forge from the former General Motors auto plant, where both Burtynsky and his father worked – and turning it into a sculpture memorializing the industry and people that once drove life in his hometown. He joins Chattopadhyay to talk about his upbringing, the resource industries that define his career and his ongoing work to make his audience connect his beautiful images to the rapid destruction of our planet.

Listen to the segment here.

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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.

Continue reading and listen here.

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