Canadian Environment Awards
Ideas for Life™ 2008

Edward Burtynsky

‘The pace of consumption I am seeing makes me feel as if the end is around the corner — in my lifetime’ PHOTO: TIMOTHY GREENFIELD-SAUNDERS

The child of an ethnic family growing up in a company town, Burtynsky was surrounded by images of industry. When he received his first camera at the age of 11, the young photographer found himself drawn to his community’s pervasive landmarks — abandoned factories and their surrounding landscapes. “Complete histories could be found in the derelict equipment and the abandonment of those places,” he recalls. “In the early days, I didn’t know what I was trying to say. But I look back on it now, and those scenes were a mix of the odd and intriguing tinged with melancholy. Things had come and gone, and what was left behind was a relic.”

Today, Burtynsky is one of Canada’s most innovative and respected photographers. The author of three books, he is an active lecturer on photography, and his work has appeared in dozens of magazines. An Officer of the Order of Canada, Burtynsky has been awarded three honorary doctorates, and in 2005, he won the prestigious Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Prize. As an artist, he is known around the world for extraordinary large-format photographic renderings of industrial landscapes — quarries, mine tailings and scrap, junk and recycling yards, among them — that portray the arresting beauty inherent in environmental degradation but challenge his audience to reflect on our destructive impact on the natural world.

Burtynsky graduated in photographic arts from Ryerson University in Toronto in 1982, and although he has always “played with form and content,” it was his formal education that helped shape his critical thinking, his technique and a sense of photographic history. “To me,” he says, “the interesting thing is that at 23, I was trying to make images where form and content had a universal appeal.” In the early 1980s, his first public exhibitions featured pristine landscapes, an essential creative prologue rooted in his love of the natural world and weekends spent camping in Algonquin Provincial Park. “I couldn’t have gone on if I didn’t have a strong sense of the natural world. It’s still a huge part of who I am,” he explains. “Nature is a reference point for how we live. It’s like saying, ‘This is what it looked like before we came in.’”

But Burtynsky soon recognized that the landscape was being indelibly altered by human activity — and this portrait had not yet been created. “No one had looked at it to any degree,” he says, “and it made me wonder how we could interpret the world in a new way.” And what better way to document the changing world than with photography? “The camera is the ultimate realist tool — it delivers excruciating detail. Photography freezes that detail, and then we can look at it, analyze it and deconstruct it.”

Unlike the news photographer, whose work and schedule are dictated by daily world events and deadlines, Burtynsky is driven to meticulously research his subject — whether it’s a mine or recycling yard — to understand its history, purpose and character intimately, all with the goal of finding its essence, both the beautiful and the haunting. “Residual landscapes tell us something important,” he explains. “We take what we want, then leave the residue of our taking. Once we take what we value, the voids that remain are very revealing.”

Part of the power of Burtynsky’s “voids” is their unfathomable scale: cavernous granite quarries; brilliant red mine tailings that flow like rivers of lava; mountains built from bales of waste and recycling materials; man-made ski hills in Dubai; and mile-long factory floors in China. The photographs send a chilling message to humankind about the untenable position we occupy — and where we are headed. “We live in a finite world of resources,” says Burtynsky. “When I started this work, I thought the end was a couple of hundred years away. But the pace of consumption I am seeing makes me feel as if it is around the corner — in my lifetime.”

Ultimately, Edward Burtynsky’s photographs arouse wistful feelings for a time and place that may be gone forever. “The natural world offers us a sense of continuity that is far less fleeting than each of our own 80-plus years,” he says. “All my work is looking with lament at the loss of nature at the hands of humans.”

About The Ideas for Life™ Award

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The Ideas for Life™ Award is sponsored by Panasonic Canada Inc.