CBC Radio - As it Happens
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.
Read MoreMetro Morning with Matt Galloway
A new art exhibition opens today at the AGO, looking at how humans have irreversibly transformed the planet. We hear from the three artists at the centre of the project: photographer Edward Burtynsky and filmmakers filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier.
Listen here.
Read MoreCBC Radio: The Current
The burning of 10,000 elephant tusks piled into an enormous funeral pyres in Kenya's National Park in Nairobi is both a devastating and beautiful image to look at — a reaction that photographer Edward Burtynsky intended.
His photographs are part of a multimedia project called Anthropocene that merges film, photography and virtual reality installations to illustrate the imprint humans are collectively leaving on the planet.
"We want to communicate out there with people. We want them to look at these things, to try to ask questions about these landscapes," he told The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti.
"If you represent them in … an unsightly light or whatever, they don't resonate. They don't make us wonder about this place."
Read the full article and listen to the interview here.
Read More