By Erica Ackerberg
NYT Book Review
The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky’s remarkable, large-scale images offer a painterly view of man-made infrastructure around the world, from quarries in Portugal to rice fields in China to oil refineries in California. His new book, AFRICAN STUDIES (Steidl, $95), focuses on a region he calls globalism’s “final stop”: sub-Saharan Africa. Capturing the impact of industrialization on the landscapes of Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Ethiopia and more from high above — from airplanes, helicopters and drones — Burtynsky’s camera documents in stunning detail and vibrant hues the toll of human intervention on our planet, from salt and sapphire mining to plastics recycling and dams. This book is both “a cautionary tale,” he says, and a reminder that this continent “still possesses some of the greatest natural reserves in the world.”\
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Read MoreBy Kate Bubacz
BuzzFeed News
Edward Burtynsky, a legendary landscape photographer, has spent the past three decades looking at how resources are used and the impact of humans on the environment around the globe. He collaborated with Nicholas de Pencier and Jennifer Baichwal on his newest project, Anthropocene, which combines scientific research with film, virtual reality, augmented reality, and photographs, and is also available as a book.
The photographs from the project are both haunting and eye-opening, offering a unique perspective on the collective result of decisions around the globe. "I have come to think of my preoccupation with the Anthrocepene — the indelible marks left by humankind on the geological face of our planet — as a conceptual extension of my first and most fundamental interests as a photographer" he says in the book's introduction.
Read the interview here.
Read MoreBy Katriina Etholén
I have here on my table the latest book by the Toronto based photographer Edward Burtynsky. The scale of the book is impressive – three kilos, 36 by 29 centimetres and 236 pages. But it’s not just the book’s size that is impressive; the theme is vast as well. It was while viewing the wondrous photographs on the walls of the Flowers Gallery in London that I decided that I needed to familiarize myself better with his current Anthropocene project and the book with the same name.
This is not the first time I have explored Burtynsky’s work. I had the privilege of meeting and interviewing him in the spring 2011 in Stockholm, just before the opening the exhibition Burtynsky: Oil in Fotografiska. I wrote two articles about him, one to go together with the oil exhibition and other one describing his large-scale project concentrating on water that he was working on at the time.
Edward Burtynsky is one of Canada’s most significant contemporary photographers. He has won multiple prestigious awards for his work and is known for his large colour photos of man-made landscapes. His projects are deep studies of the subjects, usually lasting several years. He has shown the scars and wounds that man has cut on the earth and completed vast projects on oil and water, the liquids that fuel and sustain our everyday life. His diverse body of work includes mines and quarries – which have followed him from early projects to this latest one – salt pans and ship breaking yards, railcuts and container ports, homesteads, consumerism, recycling and so on. Anthropocene is his thirteenth book and is part of a larger project.
Read the full review here.
Read MoreBy Holly Hughes
PDNOnline
Edward Burtynsky thinks big. Since the 1980s, he has been making large-format images of the extraction and exploitation of natural resources and the impact of these vast operations on the environment. His latest project is his most ambitious to date. In two exhibitions on view now at the National Gallery of Canada in Toronto and the Art Gallery of Ontario, a new book being published by Steidl, and two gallery shows opening in New York City in November, Burtynsky invites viewers to consider the subject of geological time. The title of the project, “Anthropocene,” comes from the name used to describe what, after extensive research, some scientists argue is a new geological epoch, in which dramatic changes to the Earth have been created not by a giant meteor, but by human activity.
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Read MoreBy Adele Peters
Fast Company
At the Dandora landfill in Nairobi–which officially shut down in 2012, but where people haven’t stopped dumping trash–some mounds made mostly of plastic bags rise 15 feet high.
In Edward Burtynsky’s new photo book, Anthropocene, the landfill represents the idea of “technofossils”–human-made objects, from plastic to mobile phones and cement, that will show up in the future fossil record. (Part-plastic rocks, dubbed plastigomerate, already exist.)
The book is part of a larger multimedia project, made with Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, called The Anthropocene Project, which also includes a documentary premiering today and a series of augmented reality experiences that will be part of museum shows opening on September 28. It all focuses on the Anthropocene, a term coined in 2000 to describe what some scientists argue is a new geological epoch shaped by humans as we transform landscapes, drive a sixth mass extinction, and change the climate.
Read the full article here.
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