Maclean’s Live
Renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky joins Maclean’s senior writer Paul Wells for a candid conversation at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.
Watch the interview here.
Read the interview transcript here.
Read MoreNEWS HUB
Striking photos of human scars on Earth
By Cameron Laux
BBC Culture
The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is a master of the post-industrial sublime. His sweeping point of view is, at the very least, ambivalent. His shots, most recently taken from the coolest possible standpoint of a helicopter and sometimes a satellite, are at first sight surreal and glorious, but they have an ominous documentary undertow.
His large-format photos aestheticise mining, deforestation, industrial waste and decay, monumental piles of garbage, plastic, rubber; expanses of new and decommissioned equipment so vast that they look like crystalline formations; dense human settlements which from an Olympian standpoint look like creeping mould or infestations.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreThe Human Signature: Edward Burtynsky's Anthropocene – in pictures
The Guardian
Burtynsky’s unsettling large-scale images of industrial-scale extraction, urbanisation and deforestation reveal humanity’s devastating impact on the planet
The exhibition will run at Flowers Gallery Londonfrom 17 Oct - 24 Nov.
View the gallery here.
Read MoreHuge fossil-like scars of the Anthropocene mark walls of Russian mine
By Simon Ings
New Scientist
THE lasting geological impact of our species is clearly visible within the galleries of this potash mine in Russia’s Ural mountains. The Urals contain one of the largest deposits in the world of this salt, one of the most widely used fertilisers. Mining has left behind vast subterranean galleries, their walls machine-carved with enormous ammonite-like whorls.
The Canadian photographer and artist Edward Burtynsky took this photograph for The Anthropocene Project, a collaborative chronicle of geologically significant human activity such as extraction, urbanisation and deforestation.
Read the full article here.
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ANTHROPOCENE EXAMINES THE SHOCKING IMPACT HUMANS HAVE ON THE EARTH
By Truc Nguyen
NUVO Magazine
This month, Anthropocene—a photography and multimedia art exhibition from artists Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal, and Nicholas de Pencier—opens simultaneously at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada, the first time the two museums have offered concurrent, complementary shows from the same artists. The Anthropocene Project also encompasses a feature documentary film arriving in theatres next month, a hardcover book from Steidl, and an exhibition of photographs by Burtynsky at the Nicholas Metivier Gallery in Toronto.
An endeavor for which the artists travelled to 46 different locations in 20 countries over the last four years, visiting every continent except Antarctica, the project aims to document and highlight the effect of human activity and industrialization on our planet. “Anthropocene is a word that was coined in 2000 by Paul Crutzen, and it’s a word that tries to describe what humans are doing to the planet, that we’re shifting the planet into another geological epoch,” explains Burtynsky. “Geologists are trying to tell us that we’re actually now a planetary force as a species; all of the work, whether it’s deforestation, or mining, or quarries, or farming, all of these things are key drivers of tipping us into this other state.”
A collaboration between photographer Burtynsky and filmmakers Baichwal and de Pencier, Anthropocene is a follow up to their previous films and creative projects, Manufactured Landscapes (2006) and Watermark (2013). Using both traditional photography processes and newer technology such as augmented reality and satellite imagery, the AGO exhibition showcases sites of human activity and environmental degradation as varied as the burning of a mound of confiscated ivory tusks in Nairobi, a clearcut forest on Vancouver Island, and a potash mine in Russia.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreAge of Anthropocene: Art highlights human destruction of Earth
By Jesse Tahirali & Marlene Leung
CTV News
Rainbow mountains of coloured plastic. Artificial cliffs carved into a coal mine. Sheets of pale dirt shaved clean from a shrinking forest.
Humanity’s fingerprints are pressed all over the Earth’s surface, and famed Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is putting them on full display at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Art this fall.
His new exhibit uses photo murals, video and augmented reality displays to take a wide-angle look at the “human signature” we’ve left on our planet.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreNew exhibit Anthropocene opens at the Art Gallery of Ontario
Metro Morning with Matt Galloway
A new art exhibition opens today at the AGO, looking at how humans have irreversibly transformed the planet. We hear from the three artists at the centre of the project: photographer Edward Burtynsky and filmmakers filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier.
Listen here.
Read MoreAnthropocene art show and documentary will shock you with a view of human impact on the planet
By Kate Taylor
The Globe and Mail
The project, which includes not only a new documentary but also two museum exhibitions and an art book, gives a chilling, yet sometimes beautiful, examination of the indelible and spreading mark of human activity on the planet.
Like some eerie sculpture, a dome-shaped pile of elephant tusks glimmers in a darkened gallery. It’s a non-existent thing, the virtual recreation of a huge cache of contraband ivory burned to ashes two years ago.
Poaching is pushing the African elephant to the brink, yet another example of our species' pervasive impact on the planet. The indelible and spreading mark of human activity is the meaning of the term Anthropocene and the theme of a four-year collaboration between award-winning landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky and the documentary filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier. Following on their environmental films Manufactured Landscapes and Watermark, the Anthropocene project includes not only a new documentary but also two museum exhibitions and an art book.
To produce it, the trio visited every continent except Antarctica, stopping in 20 different countries. One of those countries was Kenya where in 2016 their cameras recorded an unusual event: the burning of 100 tonnes of elephant tusks and rhino horns by government officials. Determined to save these species by demonstrating to poachers that the ivory and horn is worthless unless attached to a living animal, the Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta set light to the largest pile.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreToronto's most famous photographer brings stunning images to the AGO
Amy Carlberg
BlogTO
Edward Burtynsky has arrived at the AGO along with collaborators Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier in a sprawling exhibit that explores the impact humans have had on the earth. In Anthropocene, chilling yet beautiful images come to life through large scale photography, video and augmented reality installations.
Check out the photo gallery here.
Read MoreMaster photog Edward Burtynsky shows us the lay of the land in new National Gallery exhibit
Lynn Saxberg
Ottawa Citizen
Master photographer Edward Burtynsky has dedicated much of his life to documenting the impact of humans on earth through dramatic, large-format photographs of industrial landscapes around the world.
The St. Catharines-born artist has won numerous awards for his work, and his striking photos are included in the collections of some of the world’s most prestigious institutions, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, as well as the Tate Modern in London.
Now a powerful new multi-media exhibition, Anthropocene, opens this week at the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario. The accompanying film, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, a TIFF 2018 special presentation, will be screened at the gallery Thursday.
The result of a four-year collaboration between Burtynsky and filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, the Anthropocene project consists of large-scale photographs, films, high-resolution murals with film extensions, and augmented reality installations that bring you into the landscape. The title refers to the proposed geological term for the current epoch, defining an age when human activity has been the dominant force in changing the planet.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreHuman-altered landscapes: visions of the Anthropocene
By Zoë Ducklow
National Gallery of Canada Magazine
It was two years ago, while hovering over the Niger Delta in a two-dollar-per-second rented helicopter that Edward Burtynsky saw an oil-soaked scene of apocalyptic scale. Images of oily waterways flicker in dull rainbow hues; landscapes shine black and are littered with scorched trees; a boat speeds away from the helicopter. He had heard about oil theft in the petroleum-rich Nigerian delta, but looking at it from this vantage point, he knew it was something the world hadn’t yet seen.
“They are really tough images. They speak to a very challenging situation,” Burtynsky says. Nigeria has substantial petroleum deposits, with oil and gas pipelines dissecting the delta. Locals siphon oil from pipelines and crudely distill diesel and gasoline – profitable, marketable products. But over half of the crude oil needs sophisticated refining to be turned into anything useful. “They didn’t have a refinery. They couldn’t do anything with it. So they just poured it off on the landscape,” Burtynsky observes. It is unclear how much oil gets siphoned off, but the Nigerian government estimates 250,000 barrels daily, over half of which gets dumped. “These landscapes have oil just oozing out of them.”
The images Burtynsky made that day are one story in The Anthropocene Project, the third collaboration between Burtynsky and documentary filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier. (The two previous collaborations were the highly acclaimed Manufactured Landscapes and Watermark.) The project forms the basis of the National Gallery of Canada's multimedia exhibition Anthropocene, which brings together large-scale photographs, twelve film installations and integrated video displays, high-resolution murals and immersive Augmented Reality (AR) sculptures. A simultaneous, complementary exhibition is being held at the Art Gallery of Ontario and another showing will take place at the Fondazione MAST in Bologna next year, all being accompanied by a publication and TIFF 2018 premiere screenings of the film Anthropocene: The Human Epoch.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreAnthropocene project highlights the apocalyptic beauty of humans' effect on the planet
CBC Radio: The Current
The burning of 10,000 elephant tusks piled into an enormous funeral pyres in Kenya's National Park in Nairobi is both a devastating and beautiful image to look at — a reaction that photographer Edward Burtynsky intended.
His photographs are part of a multimedia project called Anthropocene that merges film, photography and virtual reality installations to illustrate the imprint humans are collectively leaving on the planet.
"We want to communicate out there with people. We want them to look at these things, to try to ask questions about these landscapes," he told The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti.
"If you represent them in … an unsightly light or whatever, they don't resonate. They don't make us wonder about this place."
Read the full article and listen to the interview here.
Read MoreAnthropocene reveals the scale of Earth's existential crisis
By Kevin Ritchie
NOW Toronto
Can a geological epoch become a household word?
For the last 12,000-odd years, the earth enjoyed the Holocene, the period of stable climate since the end of the last ice age. Nearly two decades ago, scientists popularized the term Anthropocene to describe the new period we are believed to have moved into – one in which human impact on earth has overtaken all other forces shaping the future.
“The word Anthropocene has been around for a while, but I thought, ‘What about trying to make that word enter the vernacular?’” says director Jennifer Baichwal during an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month. “Most people have no idea the scale of our impact. We are now a greater force than any other natural process, like earthquakes and tsunamis. We’re at a precipice here.”
Read the full article https://nowtoronto.com/culture/art-and-design/anthropocene-burtynsky-baichwal-ago/.
Read More'Reconnecting us to the wastelands': AGO's new photo exhibit shows what humanity's doing to the planet
By Trevor Dunn
CBC News
A new exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario seeks to reveal the way human activity is transforming the planet.
Just how the cumulative action of seven billion people is shaping the environment may be difficult, if not impossible, to grasp.
But the oversized photographs by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky have always sought to at least bring us a bit closer to that truth.
"These are human landscapes. We walk away and leave them as dead. But they are part of us and we need to understand them," Burtynsky said in an interview.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreApocalypse Now
By Mark Pupo
Toronto Life
Over the past 40 years, the photographer Edward Burtynsky has hunted down the world’s largest marble quarries, clear-cut forests and solar power fields. His super-sized shots showcase our ravenous appetite for Earth’s resources—Burtynsky is a war photographer of natural landscapes. For his latest project, Anthropocene, he reunited with his frequent collaborators, filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier. They travelled to 20 countries, collecting evidence of what some scientists call the anthropocene—a new epoch that began with the industrial revolution, maybe, or the nuclear bomb, in which humans took full possession of Earth. Burtynsky, characteristically, went big, producing a documentary that debuted at TIFF, a coffee table book and a multimedia exhibit, showing this fall at the National Gallery of Canada and the AGO. The result is urgent, edifying and technologically dazzling.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreLiving in the Anthropocene, the human epoch
By Alexandra Pope
Canadian Geographic
Climate change, extinctions, invasive species, the terraforming of land, the redirection of water: all are evidence of the ways human activity has shaped and continues to shape Earth’s natural processes.
Scientists have coined a word to describe this unprecedented age of human impact on the planet: the Anthropocene. Although not yet officially recognized as an epoch on the geological time scale, “Anthropocene” has been used informally to describe anywhere from the last 15,000 to the last 70 years of history — a period of significant and accelerating human-driven change.
The scale and consequences of our influence upon the Earth are explored in a groundbreaking new multimedia work by three award-winning Canadian artists — photographer Edward Burtynsky and filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier. Through film, photography, and cutting-edge augmented reality (AR) elements, The Anthropocene Project immerses viewers in the realities of our present age.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreTIFF Review: ‘ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch’
By Patrick Mullen
Point of View Magazine
Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky, Nicholas de Pencier document the devastating consequences of human activity in Anthropocene. In a way, they’ve been documenting it for nearly fifteen years. Anthropocene is the third installment in the team’s epic trilogy of spectacular environmental essay films that began with Manufactured Landscapes (2006) andWatermark (2013). The latest film is the culmination of a major body of work and it’s as visually stunning and intellectually invigorating as the previous two films are. Anthropocene, admittedly, is also a film they’ve made before—although they’ve never quite made a film on such an astonishing scale as this one.
Read the full review here.
Read MoreThese photos show just how much damage humans have done to the planet
By 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.
Read MoreA Good Anthropocene
By Edward Burtynsky
As we get closer to the launch of the The Anthropocene Project it's important to acknowledge some of the positive stories that we've documented in the last few years, which have the potential to set us up for #AGoodAnthropocene.
But in the face of inevitable human influence on the Earth, what does #AGoodAnthropocene mean? It means a move towards sustainable solutions. It means actively reducing environmental pollution and degradation. It means a global, collective effort to live consciously and responsibly.
Read MoreThe Haunting Snapshots of an Environment Under Siege
By Michael Hardy
WIRED
NORILSK, RUSSIA, IS an industrial city of 175,000 people located 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, a place so far north that it is completely dark for two months every winter. Founded as a Soviet prison labor camp, an estimated 650,000 prisoners were sent here by Stalin between 1935 and 1956; 250,000 are believed to have died from starvation or overwork.
It’s a city abounding in superlatives: Norilsk is Russia’s northernmost, coldest, and most polluted city. Why would anyone choose to live in this former gulag? Because below the ground are vast deposits of some of the world’s most valuable minerals, including palladium, which is used in cellphones and sells for about $970 an ounce.
Read the full article here.
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