NEWS HUB

Earth's Poet of Scale

By 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 More

THE LONG VIEW - Edward Burtynsky’s quest to photograph a changing planet.

By Raffi Khatchadourian
The New Yorker

Our helicopter was heading over the Niger Delta, across a vast and unstable sky, with gray clouds surging above. I was sitting behind the pilot, and behind me, gazing out a starboard window, was Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian photographer known for his sweeping images of industrial projects and their effects on the environment. For three decades, he has been documenting colossal mines, quarries, dams, roadways, factories, and trash piles—telling a story, frame by frame, of a planet reshaped by human ambition. For one seminal project, sixteen years ago, he travelled to Bangladesh to shoot decommissioned oil tankers that were being ripped apart by barefoot men with cutting torches. Those images of monumental debris—angular masses that appear to emerge from sediment like alien geology—remain transfixing. Carefully choreographed, shot in hazy and ethereal light, they echo the sublime power of a Turner landscape even as they portray a reckoning with garbage.

Read the full article here.

Read More