By Cathryn Atkinson
Pique News Magazine
Famed Canadian fine art photographer Edward Burtynsky is in Toronto at the Telus "Our Planet, Our Future" panel with other distinguished speakers, including former astronaut Roberta Bondar and Dianne Saxe, the environmental commissioner of Ontario.
In his speech, part of which is shared on social media, he asks how many in the audience know the definition of Anthropocene, the era in which we find ourselves.
For those who don't, it refers to the geological age in which human activity dominates climate and the environment.
Burtynsky has spent three decades bearing witness to the Anthropocene as an artist, whether it is his photographs depicting the impact of the Three Gorges Dam in China, or the extraction of bitumen near Fort McMurray.
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Read MoreBy Alyssa Noel
Whistler Question
With a skilled eye, honed from years of practice, renowned Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has the ability to make the appalling beautiful.
From a mountain of discarded tires to tailings ponds and open pit mines, upon first glance the viewer often doesn’t know what they’re looking at until they delve a little deeper.
Burtynsky’s work will be on display in Whistler through the summer at the Audain Art Museum as part of The Scarred Earth, a collection of 32 photographs.
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Read MoreIndigo
Essential Elements makes Indigo's Top 10 Canadian Art Books list.
View the full list here.
Read MoreBy John Geddes
Maclean's Magazine
Black-and-white street snaps and full-colour studio confections capture photographic fidelity in a National Gallery of Canada retrospective.
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Read MoreBy Ezrha Jean Black
Artillery Magazine
Edward Burtynsky’s principal subject over the last decade or so has been the industrial landscape, or more specifically, large-scale, frequently aerial views of major industrial operations, grids, excavations, or industrial waste sites. The photographs in his current show at Von Lintel continue in this vein – part of a larger project Burtynsky has titled (not surprisingly), Anthropocene. What is fascinating about the current body of work is that it returns us to the roots of visual abstraction, even the notion of landscape itself. The history of 20th century abstraction begins in landscape (e.g., Picasso’s proto-Cubist Horta landscape studies; and arguably before that). It could be argued that our entire notion of visual abstraction, of visual description, is rooted in our apprehension and appreciation of landscape as referring to a larger notion of environment and exterior surroundings generally. It is the way we define a world within our scope and grasp; also our place in it.
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Read MoreBy Anna Maria Burgstaller
Widewalls
The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky became known for documenting the transformation of nature through mankind with his breathtaking large-format photographs of landscapes altered by human hands. His images are metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence exploring the collective impact of humans on the environment. While nature provides us with the necessary materials for consumption, the planet suffers and Edward Burtynsky is documenting the scale of its destruction.
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Read MoreLomography
The landscapes of Canadian photographer Edward Butynsky is one of the famous sets to date. His large-format photographs, shaped and created by humanity for industrial purposes, shed light to one of the most intriguing topics in humanity with its global relevance.
Water, humanity's most precious resource remains our wellspring of life. Burtynsky travelled across five continents to explore the ecological scenery and capture the water resources as how they are used, distributed and wasted, disrupting the balance of the environmen. He photographs rivers such as the Colorado and Sacramento river, both estuaries now running dry. Much more can be found in his "Water series".
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Read MoreBy Adria Vasil
NOW Magazine
Photographer Ed Burtynsky's latest documentary offers unnerving look on the enormous and irreversible ways that human activity is literally reshaping Earth.
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Read MoreBy Jordan Bishop
Forbes
When it comes to finding such locations, Burtynsky doesn’t just seek out any instance of the given phenomenon: he pursues the world’s largest-scale example without regard for location or difficulty of access. When I inquire about the background work necessary to shooting a particularly eye-catching image on his studio wall – a godlike view of a seemingly-endless array of abalone and sea cucumber farms in the East China Sea – the thought process he presents is remarkably straightforward: begin by contemplating the role of water and the myriad ways humans use water for his second award-winning documentary, Watermark; identify the fishing industry as a salient theme within that narrative; discern that farm fishing is a larger global protein delivery system than open-sea fishing, and thus a more intriguing study; pinpoint China as home to the largest fish farms on Earth; visit the precise location of the world’s largest collection of fish farms, which sit in Luoyuan Bay just off the coast of Fujian province. The resultant photo, captured in one eight-hundredth of a second, was years in the making.
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Read MoreBy Daniel Stone
National Geographic
Since sometime between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, an era generally known as the Bronze Age, humans have been remarkably adept at identifying precious resources and ripping them from the Earth.
For a while, working with bronze or gold or copper meant working with your hands, and with only as much of it as one person could handle. But the 20th century, followed by the 21st, brought marvelous new ways to exploit Earth's elements, namely with industrial beasts that could tear apart landscapes with terrific volume and speed.
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Read MoreBy 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.
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Read MoreCBC Radio - The Sunday Edition
Edward Burtynsky's art is awesome. In the old-fashioned sense of the word … to wit, capable of inspiring awe in its beholder.
His huge photos of dams, mines, quarries, oil refineries, shipbreaking, irrigation and oil sands operations capture landscapes altered on a mind-boggling scale … dwarfing the humans and machines that create them and work inside them.
Burtynsky, though, is not simply a photographer of scale. His lens is attuned to the compelling symmetries of massive industrial sites, the striking, unexpected slashes of colour in rivers of mining tailings and the precise patterns of new cars fanning across a sprawling parking lot.
Continue reading and listen here.
Read MoreBy Brian Bethune
Maclean's Magazine
One of Canada’s finest photographers considers his craft—and the relationship between his art and the truth—for a retrospective book.
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Read MoreBy Robert Shore
Elephant Magazine
‘I’m looking at humans and what they’re doing to the planet as if I were an alien’: beauty and terror blend in Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky’s industrial landscapes, which bear seductively powerful witness to the ways in which we are irrevocably changing our world. Robert Shore meets the great documenter of the Anthropocene.
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Read MoreBBC Radio 3 - Free Thinking
Large-scale photographs showing the impact of humans on urban and natural environments are discussed by Canadian artist and 2005 TED prize winner Edward Burtynsky. Ella Hickson's new play Oil, directed by Carrie Cracknell, explores the politics of this natural resource from 1889 to present day. She's in conversation with Joe Douglas, director of a Dundee Rep production of John McGrath's drama The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil which is on tour this autumn. Plus, presenter Philip Dodd is joined by analysts Peter Atherton and Jeremy Leggett to consider how we meet energy demands in the face of climate change and a rapidly rising global population.
Listen here.
Read MoreBy Oliver Wainwright
The Guardian
The great photographer’s awesome images – taken from drones, propellor planes and a 50ft selfie stick – show how industry has drilled and drained our planet.
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Read MoreBy Stephen Wallis
The Wall Street Journal
In a world distracted by small-screen snapshots and selfies, two eminent photographers are proving that large-scale environmental images are not only relevant but also vital.
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Read MoreBy Richard Assheton
AnOther Magazine
"My work has never been about pitting heroes against villains. It’s about awareness." As his new retrospective exhibition launches, AnOther sits down with image-maker Edward Burtynsky.
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Read MoreBy Alistair Sooke
The Telegraph
Ahead of a new exhibition of his work, the Canadian photographer tells Alastair Sooke about the toxic allure of the world's most perilous places.
‘I’ve been to China a dozen times,” says the 61-year-old landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky, “but I’ve never visited the Great Wall.” He smiles. “I don’t go to tourist places. I enter into worlds behind chain-link fences and barbed wire.”
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Read MoreBy Lynn Trimble
Phoenix New Times
Due in part to a particularly robust lineup of local gallery exhibitions for July’s First and Third Friday art walks in downtown Phoenix, there was an abundance of great art on view during July 2016. We saw plenty of great art outside of Phoenix, too – especially in East Valley cities including Chandler and Mesa. But 10 works, pictured here, stood out from all the rest.
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