NEWS HUB

Powerful images show the environmental impact of recent industrialization in Africa

By Kristine Thoreson
Galleries West

In the light-filled back room of the Paul Kuhn Gallery, I’m both transfixed and perplexed by the colours in a photograph by Edward Burtynsky. Salt Flats #2, Sua Pan, Botswana holds luscious swirls of cherry-blossom pinks and amethyst purples. It’s so mesmerizing, I barely wonder what it is.

The image, part of the Toronto photographer’s latest body of work, African Studies, is on view in Calgary until May 27. Burtynsky’s large colour prints show aerial views from across Sub-Saharan Africa shot between 2015 and 2020 using fixed-wing planes, helicopters and drones. He visited 10 countries in all – Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal, South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Madagascar and Tanzania. 

Read the full article here.

Read More

SNEAK PEEK: Edward Burtynsky

Galleries West

Edward Burtynsky has travelled the globe photographing dramatic scenes of environmental change – a massive dam project in China, a stark lithium mine in Chile, a polluted ship-breaking site on the coast of Bangladesh.

But the pandemic’s mandatory lockdown last spring saw the Toronto photographer retreat to the woods of the Bruce Peninsula along the southern shore of Georgian Bay.

It was here, during the uncertainty and devastating losses wrought by another global traveller, the new coronavirus that's hitching a ride on human carriers, that Burtynsky created a series of photographs that speak to nature’s power of renewal.

Read the full article here.

Read More