CANADALAND
For over 40 years Burtynsky’s camera has captured mountain ranges scarred and scooped from mining operations, roiling tar sand tailing ponds, and fractal river systems alight with red industrial sludge. His work is a catalogue of the awesome destructive power at the root of our industrial culture.
Listen to the episode here.
Read MoreBy 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.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Donald Kuspit
Whitehot Magazine
We’re high above the Salt River Pima and Maricopa Indian Community, a suburb of Scottsdale, Arizona in the USA, 2011, the master Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky tells us, looking down at what seem to be fields of green—flourishing nature, arranged in intricate geometrical patterns—twinned with what seem to be a desiccated version of the same field, no longer enjoyably scenic, delightfully picturesque.
Read the full review here.
Read MoreBy Hadrien Volle
CBC Radio-Canada
As he has done for over 40 years, Edward Burtynsky depicts the effects of industrial activity on landscapes.
He himself was born in St. Catharines , Ontario, in an environment made up of factories where his father worked. Since then, he has represented five continents through his work.
The selection on display at the Nicholas Metivier Gallery on Richmond Street East in Toronto consists of seven photographs, five of which were taken in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Read the full article here.
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.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreB&H Photography Podcast
Industrial expansion has left an indelible mark on our natural world, fundamentally altering landscapes and ecosystems for the sake of material progress and modern convenience. This transformation has created an environmental challenge of unprecedented scale. In today’s show, we’ll connect the dots between the raw materials that make up our planet and the industrial forces visually altering our contemporary landscape in a chat with a photographer who’s documented these profound global changes firsthand for the past 50 years.
Listen to the episode here.
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.
Read the full article here.
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.
Read the full article here.
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.
Read the full interview here.
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.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Ellen Cory
Musée Magazine
The Great Acceleration is Edward Burtynsky’s first solo institutional show in New York in over twenty years. It brings together more than seventy images that reveal how humans have transformed landscapes worldwide, showing both their fragile beauty and the urgent challenges we face. Curated by David Campany at ICP and opening on June 19th, the exhibition is a call to action that echoes ICP’s dedication to concerned photography. In this conversation, Burtynsky shares his perspective after decades spent documenting a planet constantly changing under our hands.
Read the interview here.
Read MoreBy Daniel Nash
Billionaire Magazine
How do you balance the need to show the realistic devastation wrought on the planet, with needing to create a work of beauty?
It's a paradox I've lived with for decades. The beauty is the hook. It draws people in. But then there’s the dissonance. Once you’re close, you realize the subject is industrial scars, mining pits, or polluted rivers. That moment of realization, that tension between form and content, is exactly where I want people to linger. The work isn’t about condemnation. It’s about comprehension. I believe beauty can be a powerful way to hold attention, to provoke thought, and to give difficult subjects a chance to be truly seen, even in domestic or personal spaces.
Read the full interview here.
Read MoreBBC
Photographer Ed Burtynsky has been capturing the impact of humans on Earth for over 40 years. Here are ten of his most striking shots, from a shipwrecking yard in Bangladesh to rivers of iron dioxide in Canada. This June, the International Center of Photography in New York is dedicating a retrospective to The Great Acceleration, the seminal work of the Canadian artist.
Video by Anna Bressanin, filmed by Darryl Laiu
Read More