By Neil Ever Osborne and M.A. Jacquemain
The Weather Network
After the public world premiere of Burtynsky’s multimedia art piece, In the Wake of Progress, on the towering screens surrounding Yonge-Dundas Square, this new body of work has been transformed into “an immersive walkthrough experience” at the Canadian Opera Company Theatre in Toronto for a limited run from June 25-July 17.
Renowned Canadian photographic artist Edward Burtynsky has launched a new exhibit this month, revisiting his lifelong subject of the human impact on the planet.
“We're at that point where words aren't enough,” he added. “We need to act.”
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Sue Carter
Toronto Star
The lush forest in the opening sequence of photographer Edward Burtynsky’s “In the Wake of Progress,” a monumental new film installation at the Canadian Opera Company Theatre, provides visitors with some digital tree-bathing.
Visitors can move around and get up close as a caribou saunters and a bald eagle flies in, surveying the scene across three nine-metre screens. An animator spent six months in post-production adding wildlife and movement to one of Burtynsky’s panoramic still photos and the effects are seamless, down to the rustling ferns.
Despite the peacefulness, there is underlying anxiety. This is Burtynsky, after all, who has dedicated his 40-year career to documenting human impact on the environment. Serenity isn’t the intended takeaway from “In the Wake of Progress.” It’s a call to action and to witness.
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Read MoreBy Irena Galea
The Globe and Mail
Burtynsky’s newest work is a 22-minute film that forces viewers to reckon with the global environmental and human impact of industrialization.
The boy on the screen leans against his metal tools in Chittagong, Bangladesh, to the sound of a warped orchestra. He’s dwarfed by the blackened hull of a ship looming behind him. It’s no longer being covered by insurance, so somebody, somewhere, has to take it apart. He got the job.
The hazardous working conditions he endures are propped up by the same developed countries where his photograph might be viewed, as Western shipowners often outsource their shipbreaking to Asian countries such as Bangladesh, exploiting cheap labour and a lack of workplace regulation.
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Read MoreBy Meghan Yuri Young
Now Playing Toronto
Internationally renowned Edward Burtynsky has devoted his career to documenting how our insatiable desire for consumption impacts our environment. Burtynsky’s most ambitious project takes him into uncharted territory as a visual artist to illustrate the devastation’s increased sense of urgency.
Read the full interview here.
Read MoreElsa Lam
Canadian Architect
Toronto’s Yonge Dundas Square is usually a canyon of advertising. But in a commission for this June’s Luminato festival, photographer Ed Burtynsky transformed the 22 screens in the square into a canvas for an immersive media piece entitled In the Wake of Progress.
Drawing on footage from Burtynsky’s 40 years of photography and film projects, the 20-minute wordless piece traces humanity’s fall from Eden: moving from old growth forests to lands swept barren by clear cuts, and thence to suburbs, skyscrapers, and slums. Burtynsky’s iconic images of mountain-deep Carrera marble quarries, post-industrial shipbreakers, and blood red copper tailing pools make an appearance, the latter set to an especially ominous passage of chanting in the cinematic soundtrack by Phil Strong.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreChris Dart
CBC Arts
"In the Wake of Progress," the latest exhibit from photographic artist Edward Burtynsky, has been a long time coming — in more ways than one.
The exhibit — which is part of this year's Luminato Festival — consists of photos of human's impact on the world around them, selected from across Burtynsky's 40-plus year career. The pictures are displayed across 22 massive outdoor screens at Toronto's Yonge-Dundas Square, screens that usually show advertisements, and choreographed to music by composer Phil Strong.
It was also, in an alternate world, supposed to happen two years ago.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreCBC Radio | What on Earth
Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has devoted much of his career to highlighting the ways humanity impacts the planet.
And he's setting out to do again with his latest art installation, In the Wake of Progress, which will take over all of the screens at Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto this weekend. The project will include photography and film starting with verdant untouched forests followed by images of the many ways humans have impacted the planet with practices like mining and deforestation.
Burtynsky spoke to What On Earth host Laura Lynch in his studio in Toronto about his latest public art project and how his role as an artist and advocate for the environment has changed over the course of his career. Here is part of their conversation.
Listen to the interview and read the Q&A here.
Read MoreBy Kate Taylor
The Globe and Mail
“Photography embodies truth in a way that transcends language, culture, borders, and time. In the face of fake news and Putin’s vicious disinformation campaign, Ukrainian photographers are using this moment to show the world the truth.
“Their dedication to their art, even as their towns are surrounded by invading Russian forces bringing terror to their doorsteps, is a bravery that humbles me.
“Photography is about light conquering darkness. And as we speak, Ukrainian photographers are conquering an unimaginable form of darkness. I can think of no more outstanding contribution to photography than that.”
Read the article here.
Read MoreBy Edward Burtynsky
The Globe & Mail
It feels a little surreal to be commemorating the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in the middle of this unprecedented global crisis. Admittedly, I had envisioned this day much differently, yet with COVID-19 forcing us all into isolation, the message of Earth Day seems more urgent than ever.
My 40-year career as an artist has taken me on a journey around our planet in search of the largest examples of human systems expressed upon the land and sea. I have been to many places that very few of us have any reason to go – the places where we wrest out the things we need from nature to propel our human destiny. My first trip to China in 2002 took me to Wuhan en route to photograph along the Yangtze River, where entire cities and landscapes were being commandeered and flattened to make way for the building of the Three Gorges Dam. So, when the pictures first emerged of the coronavirus lockdown in Wuhan months ago, never did I imagine seeing cities being shut down in this new and devastating way – or that we would soon experience this contagion all over the world.
There’s no doubt that the ravenous human appetite to conquer nature has compelled us to encroach on natural habitats and biodiversity in an ever-expanding way, and that this has led us to where we are today – isolated at home, with a new pathogen determined to wreak global havoc. It seems the paradigm has shifted: Where humans once had our collective boot on nature’s neck, we now find ourselves with nature’s boot firmly pressed against ours.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Kate Taylor
The Globe and Mail
★★★★
Vast rectangular ponds of foul yellow water lie evaporating in the Chilean desert; they will produce the lithium that powers electric-car batteries. A gorgeous red-and-grey rock is imprinted with an eye-catching circular pattern: It’s the mark of Russian potash mining, extracting one of the fertilizers that is permanently altering the composition of the Earth’s soil. Anthropocene: The Human Epoch is packed with such shattering images and astounding ironies. As documentarians Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier pursue their collaboration with photographer Edward Burtynsky in a third film (following Manufactured Landscapes and Watermark), they strike a delicate yet purposeful balance between observation and advocacy. Both shocking and beautiful, the film impresses itself on the viewer with the awesome scale of the imagery – and with the urgency behind it. We have entered an epoch in which human activity is shaping the planet more than any natural force. Anthropocene bears witness that something’s got to give.
The film Anthropocene: The Human Epoch opens Friday in Toronto, Oct. 5 in Vancouver, Oct. 19 in Montreal and through the fall in other cities.
Read MoreBy Kate Taylor
The Globe and Mail
The project, which includes not only a new documentary but also two museum exhibitions and an art book, gives a chilling, yet sometimes beautiful, examination of the indelible and spreading mark of human activity on the planet.
Like some eerie sculpture, a dome-shaped pile of elephant tusks glimmers in a darkened gallery. It’s a non-existent thing, the virtual recreation of a huge cache of contraband ivory burned to ashes two years ago.
Poaching is pushing the African elephant to the brink, yet another example of our species' pervasive impact on the planet. The indelible and spreading mark of human activity is the meaning of the term Anthropocene and the theme of a four-year collaboration between award-winning landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky and the documentary filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier. Following on their environmental films Manufactured Landscapes and Watermark, the Anthropocene project includes not only a new documentary but also two museum exhibitions and an art book.
To produce it, the trio visited every continent except Antarctica, stopping in 20 different countries. One of those countries was Kenya where in 2016 their cameras recorded an unusual event: the burning of 100 tonnes of elephant tusks and rhino horns by government officials. Determined to save these species by demonstrating to poachers that the ivory and horn is worthless unless attached to a living animal, the Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta set light to the largest pile.
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Read MoreBy Kate Taylor
The Globe and Mail
It takes money, time and persistence to get a movie made in any country but in Canada the task can feel like moving a mountain. I’m looking forward to the slate of Canadian films at the Toronto International Film Festival this year and in particular I am eager to see three titles with prolonged gestation periods. One was stuck in post-production for many months; another is the culmination of a director’s life work and the third … well, you could say it’s a project forged over the centuries.
That last one is Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, a non-fiction film by Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier arguing that we have entered a new geological epoch in which human activity is the main force shaping the planet. Massive-scale industrialization and development are now permanently changing the air, water and land.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreThe Globe and Mail
What a difference a book makes.
Edward Burtynsky was an established Canadian photographer who didn’t have much in the way of an international profile. Then along came the publication, in 2003, of Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky, tied in with his touring National Gallery of Canada exhibition. When the book, co-published by the National Gallery and Yale University Press, landed on shelves in major bookstores and museums around the world, the St. Catharines, Ont., native immediately felt the impact.
“All of a sudden I was getting calls from Europe. I was getting calls from the States,” Mr. Burtynsky recalls. “They were all saying, ‘This is really interesting and important work. How did I not know about you?’ ”
Read the full article here.
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