By Jordan Bishop
Forbes
When it comes to finding such locations, Burtynsky doesn’t just seek out any instance of the given phenomenon: he pursues the world’s largest-scale example without regard for location or difficulty of access. When I inquire about the background work necessary to shooting a particularly eye-catching image on his studio wall – a godlike view of a seemingly-endless array of abalone and sea cucumber farms in the East China Sea – the thought process he presents is remarkably straightforward: begin by contemplating the role of water and the myriad ways humans use water for his second award-winning documentary, Watermark; identify the fishing industry as a salient theme within that narrative; discern that farm fishing is a larger global protein delivery system than open-sea fishing, and thus a more intriguing study; pinpoint China as home to the largest fish farms on Earth; visit the precise location of the world’s largest collection of fish farms, which sit in Luoyuan Bay just off the coast of Fujian province. The resultant photo, captured in one eight-hundredth of a second, was years in the making.
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Read MoreBy Daniel Stone
National Geographic
Since sometime between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, an era generally known as the Bronze Age, humans have been remarkably adept at identifying precious resources and ripping them from the Earth.
For a while, working with bronze or gold or copper meant working with your hands, and with only as much of it as one person could handle. But the 20th century, followed by the 21st, brought marvelous new ways to exploit Earth's elements, namely with industrial beasts that could tear apart landscapes with terrific volume and speed.
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Read MoreBy Brian Bethune
Maclean's Magazine
One of Canada’s finest photographers considers his craft—and the relationship between his art and the truth—for a retrospective book.
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Read MoreBy Robert Shore
Elephant Magazine
‘I’m looking at humans and what they’re doing to the planet as if I were an alien’: beauty and terror blend in Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky’s industrial landscapes, which bear seductively powerful witness to the ways in which we are irrevocably changing our world. Robert Shore meets the great documenter of the Anthropocene.
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Read MoreBy Alistair Sooke
The Telegraph
Ahead of a new exhibition of his work, the Canadian photographer tells Alastair Sooke about the toxic allure of the world's most perilous places.
‘I’ve been to China a dozen times,” says the 61-year-old landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky, “but I’ve never visited the Great Wall.” He smiles. “I don’t go to tourist places. I enter into worlds behind chain-link fences and barbed wire.”
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