By Ariella Budik
Financial Times
Activist or aesthete? Poet or propagandist? Redeemer or pornographer of disaster? Where does Edward Burtynsky, the creator of massive photographs of our ravaged planet, stand on the relationship between his art and impoverished nature? A retrospective of Burtynsky’s four-decade (and counting) career at the International Center of Photography in New York doesn’t answer the question, but it gives viewers plenty of ammunition with which to support whatever conclusion they choose.
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Read MoreBy Bill McKibben
The New Yorker
Since Edward Burtynsky’s birth in Ontario, Canada, in 1955, the Earth’s population has roughly tripled, and its economy has grown tenfold. This “great acceleration,” to use the title of the (exquisitely curated and hung) retrospective newly installed at the International Center of Photography, on the Lower East Side, is the most anomalous stretch in human history, and during the past four decades Burtynsky has been almost certainly its greatest visual chronicler—a poet of scale, making use of ever-better lenses and innovations such as drones to gain an ever more encompassing perspective. Perhaps the only photographer to have backed up farther from this subject was Bill Anders, the Apollo 8 astronaut who gave us “Earthrise,” in 1968. But that image was taken from too far away to even hint at the stress that the Earth was undergoing as the human footprint expanded. Burtynsky had the perfect depth of field for the task, and his images have become steadily more complicated over time.
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Read MoreBy Veronica Esposito
The Guardian
Few if any photographers have done more than Edward Burtynsky to shape our view of the large-scale industrial production that is a constant, ever-expanding part of the capitalist system. Since the 1980s, he has created more than a dozen multiyear series, tackling extractive industries like mining and oil refining in India, China and Azerbaijan, traveling to such disparate places as Western Australia, Chile’s Atacama desert and the so-called ship graveyards of Bangladesh.
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Read MoreBy Simon Ings
New Scientist
There is no geophysical logic to the sharp partition in the middle of this picture. A US federal act, the Land Ordinance of 1785, divided North America’s vast western territories into rectilinear townships and sections. So when pumps pull water out of the aquifer beneath Salt River Valley, Arizona, squares of desert like this suburb of Phoenix grow green, settled and busy.
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Read MoreBy Hailey Akau
Flaunt Magazine
New York City—the Big Apple, the city that never sleeps, perhaps even, a city among the greats on the world stage—becomes the focal point for contemporary photographer Edward Burtynsky’s return this summer with citywide programming centered on the artist’s climate mission. The International Center of Photography will exhibit Edward Burtynsky: The Great Acceleration from June 19 to September 28.
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Read MoreBy Mariah Alanskas
Fast Company
Edward Burtnysky has documented human impact on the environment for decades. A new show examines just how much damage we’ve done.
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Read MoreBy Ben Sutton
The Art Newspaper
The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has spent more than 40 years chronicling the many ways that humans have remade the natural landscape to suit their wants and needs. His work has taken him from greenhouses in Ontario, oilfields in Texas and suburban developments in the Arizona desert to e-waste recycling communities in China, shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh and clothing factories in Ethiopia. Now, more than 70 of his photographs from 1981 onwards are on view in Edward Burtynsky: The Great Acceleration (until 28 September), a retrospective at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York curated by the centre’s creative director, David Campany.
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