{"id":199012,"date":"2025-06-20T05:08:17","date_gmt":"2025-06-20T05:08:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/199012\/"},"modified":"2025-06-20T05:08:17","modified_gmt":"2025-06-20T05:08:17","slug":"edward-burtynskys-photographs-convey-the-force-of-mankinds-reordering-of-the-environment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/199012\/","title":{"rendered":"Edward Burtynsky\u2019s photographs convey the force of mankind\u2019s reordering of the environment"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky<\/a> 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\u2019s creative director, David Campany.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe work has always been about the industrialisation of nature\u2014showing the scale of what we need to provide what we\u2019re taking from nature and how we\u2019re shaping it to our own needs,\u201d Burtynsky says. \u201cBut I’m not interested in making a kind of a guidebook to what we’re doing. They\u2019re more iconographic representations of human need.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Edward Burtynsky, Shipbreaking #23, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000 \u00a9 Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York<\/p>\n

The exhibition is organised thematically rather than chronologically, focusing on mining operations, oil exploitation, vast factories, infrastructure projects of biblical proportions, landscapes turned incongruous colours by industrial activities and more. It includes a group of Burtynsky\u2019s portraits\u2014an elderly woman in China pausing next to a pile of electronic waste she is sorting through, a shipbreaker posing at the base of a disassembled tanker that fills the entire frame\u2014which he has made regularly throughout his projects but never shown as a discrete group. It includes some of his earliest works from the first half of the 1980s capturing the scale of industrial farming and mineral extraction in Canada, which are also among his smallest photographs on view.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was my biggest print back then\u2014it was considered big at the time,\u201d he says, referring to photographs around two feet wide of mines in Ontario and British Columbia from 1984 and 1985. \u201cThe organisation of the frame, the all-overness and flattening, was already at work and defining a way of seeing.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Edward Burtynsky, Mines #13, Inco – Abandoned Mine Shaft, Crean Hill Mine, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, 1984 \u00a9 Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York<\/p>\n

For all their disorienting power, those early images look almost quaint compared to Burtynsky\u2019s more recent prints, which like the landscapes he is photographing have grown practically industrial in scale. One of the newest photographs in the show\u2014of a copper mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo where multi-storey piles of mineral-rich soil have turned the landscape every shade of red\u2014is ten feet wide. Nearby, one entire 30ft-by-30ft gallery wall is covered by an aerial photograph of a farm in the Texas desert. The image was printed on adhesive vinyl in Burtynsky\u2019s Toronto studio, where he has developed a range of advanced scanning, printing and imaging processes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the biggest photograph I\u2019ve ever printed,\u201d he says of the mural version of Pivot Irrigation #8, High Plains, Texas Panhandle, USA (2012), which looks nearly abstract until the eye registers the tiny buildings and cars in the lower lefthand corner. \u201cIt\u2019s taken from the belly of a Cessna shooting straight down to give a sense of the scale of the pivot irrigation system. It was part of a project on water\u2014about 70% of human use of water is agricultural.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Edward Burtynsky, Pivot Irrigation #8, High Plains, Texas Panhandle, USA, 2012 \u00a9 Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York<\/p>\n

The ICP retrospective is the centrepiece of a bonafide Burtynsky bonanza in New York this summer. The nearby cinema Metrograph will show a trio of documentaries<\/a> he made between 2006 and 2018 with the film-makers Jennifer Baichwal and Nick de Pencier (20-28 June). He will then have a solo exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery<\/a>, Natural Commodities (7-20 August); and the following month Heft Gallery<\/a> will show Hypertopographics (3-27 September), his collaborative project with the artificial intelligence (AI) artist Alkan Avc\u0131o\u011flu<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlkan is taking the world where he thinks it\u2019s going to be in 50 to 100 years and extending the scope and scale through AI,\u201d Burtynsky says. \u201cThe images are creating this sense of an uncanny valley where the landscapes almost look probable.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Drone preparation, Burtynsky in Lagos, Nigeria, 2017 \u00a9 Edward Burtynsky Photography<\/p>\n

The Great Acceleration, meanwhile, will remain on view through late September including, crucially, during Climate Week NYC 2025 (21-28 September), when his awe-inspiring images of mankind\u2019s more or less indifferent remaking of the environment will surely find receptive audiences.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don’t see myself as a documentary photographer, I try to find singular images that just reveal or remind us of these cycles of consumption,\u201d Burtynsky says. \u201cThere are three large phases: the source where everything comes from in the making, the consumption and then the waste stream. I focus on the first and last stages. To me, life is consumption.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Edward Burtynsky, Silver Spark Apparel #1, Hawassa Industrial Park, Awassa, Ethiopia, 2018 \u00a9 Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York<\/p>\n