Edward Burtynsky (b.1955) is internationally celebrated as among the most accomplished contemporary photographers. Admired for his superb large-scale images of industrial landscapes that reveal the human impact on the planet, his approach to exploring the various manifestations of the industrial landscape has been systematic, as if he were building a typology of industries and their impact on Earth’s climate, ecosystems, and geology. The aestheticization of the inaesthetic has been his method over a forty-year career documenting environmental, technological, and social change. Today, his famously compelling images of unlikely subjects are held in over sixty art museums worldwide, including the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate Modern (London), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York).
Early life
Burtynsky family portrait.
Edward Taras Buratynsky was born on February 22, 1955, to Maria (Mary) and Peter Buratynsky, immigrants from Ukraine who met in Canada and settled in St. Catharines, Ontario. One of four children, including a daughter born to Mary from a previous marriage, Edward grew up in a predominantly Ukrainian working-class neighbourhood where the language was prevalent; he still speaks it.
Peter had been a shepherd in his youth, back in the Carpathian Mountains of Southern Ukraine. He was not prone to nostalgic storytelling, and little else is known about the man’s early years, which were almost certainly tumultuous given the shrapnel in his back. He was an outdoorsman and an amateur painter on his own time; otherwise, Peter worked on the production line at the local General Motors (GM) plant.
Mary, a homemaker and community volunteer, was born in a village south of Kiev. She raised four children in Canada after surviving not only Hitler’s horrific occupation of Ukraine but also the Holodomor, the genocidal famine that Stalin inflicted on his neighbours for resisting collectivization. These twin cataclysms flattened the country—Europe’s largest by area—taking between 10 and 14 million Ukrainian lives. Luckily for Canadian art, Mary and Peter’s weren’t among them.
During his childhood, Edward was fascinated by his father’s worlds: the natural, the pictorial, and the industrial. He hiked and fished with his dad on the Niagara Escarpment where, painting next to him, he learned the skills of observation and picture-making. A visit to Peter’s workplace, the vast GM plant in St. Catharines, had a powerful effect on the eight-year-old boy’s imagination. Later, he would recount how its grandeur had filled him with awe, and how he had never seen anything more extraordinary, aside perhaps from the breathtaking Niagara Escarpment. Once he became serious about making pictures professionally, industry and its natural context merged to become his signature subject: the industrial landscape.
Edward Burtynsky as a child.
Inside the General Motors plant, formerly located on Ontario Street in St. Catharines, c.1963, Archives and Special Collections, Brock University Library.
A present from his father would prove doubly determining. Peter saw a notice in the want ads from a woman selling her late husband’s cameras and darkroom paraphernalia. As the man had been a serious hobbyist, the equipment was of better quality and more comprehensive than the $25 asking price reflected. Peter acquired the lot for his son’s eleventh birthday. It included Edward’s first camera, a Minolta A with a 35mm fixed lens. The artist shares that he was “hooked from the first moment” developing his first photograph: “I remember the whole experience—watching the image come up in the developer tray. It seemed pure magic, that I’d made the three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional object…. That camera became my way of depicting and explaining the world. After that, I always had it with me, and a couple spools of film.”
Edward’s first darkroom was in the basement of the family home at 33 Spruce Street in St. Catharines. The space was makeshift: trays with processing chemicals were arranged on a sheet of plywood placed on top of the furnace’s oil tanks. His father’s gift was given with the proviso that Edward pay for the film, chemicals, and paper himself. To finance his new hobby, the young artist launched a portrait business at the local Ukrainian community centre. With this gift and the conditions that came with it, Peter turned his son into a photographer and an entrepreneur in one stroke.
Edward Burtysnky as a child.
Mary died in 2026 at the age of 102, but Peter predeceased her by over half a century. When Edward was only fifteen years old, Peter succumbed to an aggressive cancer that almost certainly resulted from his daily contact with carcinogenic chemicals at work. He was forty-five years old. Before they were banned in Canada in 1977, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) had been common in many industries since the 1940s. Non-flammable, thermally stable, and chemically inert, they were a standard component of lubricants and other machine fluids.
Following his father’s death, Edward was thrust into the working world to help his mother support the family. He quit school after completing Grade 12. By his late teens, he was a full-fledged labourer, chasing a sequence of jobs—including employment at an industrial printing press, stamping out truck frames, working the assembly line at the Ford plant in Oakville, and mining gold in Western Ontario. All of these brief gigs would give him first-hand experience of the industrial environments that would become the focus of his later work.
By the time he was a teenager, Burtynsky’s childhood hobby had become a vocation. After work, instead of bonding in taverns with his peers, he would “just wander off somewhere and take pictures.” The aspiring artist took night classes in photography at Niagara College in Welland, Ontario. Archie Hood, his instructor, regularly gave his students outdoor assignments to photograph nature. Recognizing Edward’s talent, Hood recommended that, upon graduation from college, he should enrol full-time at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto (now Toronto Metropolitan University). The school was known to have the country’s best and most thorough program of photographic training. To finance the move to Toronto in 1976, Burtynsky took a summer contract at GM where he was tasked with replacing the lubricants and fluids containing the toxic PCBs from his father’s old assembly line.
School days at Ryerson.
Edward Burtysnky, Savannah, Georgia, 2nd Year Ryerson Portfolio, 1978, gelatin silver print, The Image Centre, Toronto Metropolitan University.
The artist fondly recalls his time at Ryerson, where he studied until 1982, as stimulating. Many of his teachers were recognized professionals, among them street photographer Dave Heath (1931–2016), documentarian Phil Bergerson (b.1947), social science instructor Bob Scott (1933–2019), film scholar Murray Pomerance (b.1946), photo historian Don Dickinson (1942–2007), and art historian Marta Braun (b.1946), who kindled the artist’s lifelong interest in abstract art. Burtynsky took a brief hiatus between his third and fourth years in the program to earn enough money to buy his own large-format camera and lenses, and to reflect more carefully on what the subject of his graduation portfolio should be. Fatefully, his instructor Rob Gooblar (1945–1997) told his students to go out and find “evidence of man”—in other words, the imprint of human activity on the land. Burtynsky has been fulfilling that assignment ever since.
Edward Burtynsky, Heinz Ketchup Bottling Plant from the series Packing, 1982, chromogenic print, The Image Centre, Toronto Metropolitan University.
The young professional
Upon graduation from Ryerson in 1982, Burtynsky received a series of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts. This institutional support enabled the emerging artist to travel in pursuit of his photographic ambitions and explore his new enthusiasm: colour prints at the scale of painting. Although his teachers still considered black and white prints the standard for art photography, Burtynsky was introduced to colour in a course on commercial work and portraiture. He was also becoming aware of the use of colour at scale by photographic artists such as Stephen Shore (b.1947), Joel Meyerwitz (b.1938), Joel Sternfeld (b.1944), and Eliot Porter (1901–1990). For him, colour photography felt pioneering by comparison to the black-and-white orthodoxy.
Edward Burtynsky, Landscape Study #3, Ontario, Canada, 1981.
Edward Burtynsky, Homesteads #32, View from Highway 8, British Columbia, 1985.
Burtynsky turned his camera toward a wide range of sites at the time: grasses on the Niagara Escarpment, rail cuts in the Rocky Mountains, homesteads in various remote sites across North America, and the aftermath of the eruption of Mount St. Helens. His approach to his subject matter on these early excursions is less tightly focused than it would become later in his career, though the difference is subtle. Notable works from this period include Landscape Study #3, Ontario, Canada, 1981, and Homesteads #32, View from Highway 8, British Columbia, 1985. His singular perspective on the genre that would mark his artistic maturity—the industrial landscape—also began to take shape in these early years. Travelling alone, he drove all over North America in search of industrial subjects. As he had begun exhibiting in group shows right out of school in 1982, he was motivated to build a corpus in earnest.
In 1985, Edward married Jeannie Baxter. He took the administrative opportunity offered by his marriage to streamline the spelling of his family name, Buratynsky, deleting the “a” to become Burtynsky. With a family to support—the couple would have two daughters—the artist needed a more reliable source of income than government grants, as crucial as they were to his early development. The lack of professional services in his field—particularly darkroom rentals—and his own mastery of the medium inspired the couple’s establishment of Toronto Image Works the same year, with the help of investors.
Along with access to darkrooms, Toronto Image Works—now Total Image Works (TIW)—would also provide specialized film processing and printing services and offer darkroom courses among other services. With full-time work for Burtynsky, and three employees to manage, the business was a great distraction from his creative practice, but it gave him systematic access to all the latest photographic technologies as they appeared—giclée printing with colourfast inks, digital equipment, advanced cameras and papers—deepening his technical sophistication in a constantly evolving medium.
Construction of Toronto Image Works.
Technical virtuosity has been central to Burtynsky’s style. It was also germane to both his subject and his medium. Born in 1839 after a long gestation, photography is a child of the Industrial Revolution, an inherently technological medium that relies on chemical engineering and numerous industries, including paper milling, mining for pigments, and manufacturing of photographic equipment. By founding Toronto Image Works, Burtynsky ensured that he had access to, and an eye on, the most important developments of the medium.
In 1988, the year he turned thirty-three, Burtynsky had his first of many monographic museum exhibitions: Breaking Ground, which opened at the recently launched Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in Ottawa and toured to thirteen venues across Canada. The show consisted of forty-two colour prints drawn from his work over the preceding six years: industrial and natural subjects that he had found on his travels across Canada and the United States. That same year, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, acquired an entire portfolio of his work commissioned for an exhibition and publication entitled Money Matters: A Critical Look at Bank Architecture. He also presented his first exhibition in New York that year, at the Laurence Miller Gallery. Evidently, the taxing start-up hampered neither his artistic nor his professional progress. An international audience for Burtynsky’s work began to grow, though it would be another five years before his first solo show at home in Toronto.
Cover of Breaking Ground: Photographs by Edward Burtynsky.
Edward Burtynsky, Nicollet Mall Façade, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Minneapolis, Minnesota, from the series Banks, 1987–1988, chromogenic print, The Image Centre, Toronto Metropolitan University.
QUARRIES, 1991–1993
Burtynsky’s rigorous approach to image-making was established from the outset. He has rarely deviated from the core themes that have informed his corpus since the 1990s. In particular: scale and the poetics of the transfigured landscape.
Edward Burtynsky at the Carrara marble quarry in Tuscany, Italy.
For two years, starting in 1991, Burtynsky travelled mostly alone throughout North America and Western Europe photographing quarries. He was intrigued by the formal incongruity between the extreme geometric simplicity of quarrying methods and the lyrical abstract patterning of the excavated stone. Nature’s inexorable reclamation of abandoned quarries—time’s slow erasure of human toil—added a melancholic dimension to the images he produced. The “ruin returning to nature” has been a familiar theme in art history since the Renaissance. A variant of the vanitas genre, it was epitomized by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) in such paintings as The Abbey in the Oakwood, 1809–10. Burtynsky would return to the theme throughout his career.
The artist’s travels took him to Carrara in Tuscany, which could not be ignored. Mined since antiquity for its luminous white marble, Carrara offered a charged historical reference point. The stone excavated here was used in the creation of masterworks of the Western canon, including the Augustus of Prima Porta, Michelangelo’s David, and Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.5 Although art grade statuario, or monochromatic marble suitable for sculpture, has been exhausted for decades, Burtynsky’s pictures of Carrara, including Carrara Marble Quarries #3, Carrara, Italy, 1993, show that the site’s veined stone is still plentiful and continues to furnish kitchens with countertops and buildings with cladding.
Edward Burtynsky, Carrara Marble Quarries #3, Carrara, Italy, 1993.
In Barre, Vermont—home of the Rock of Ages Granite Quarry—Burtynsky photographed the vast open pit from multiple vantage points, rendering its inverted pyramid as both monumental architecture and abstract composition. The towering cuts in the rock are of an impressive height, recalling in one instance a thicket of blind high-rises. In some of the sunnier shots, fantastical strips of faceted stone rise from oxidized pools of bright green water. Human figures, when present, are diminished by the scale of the operation. Emphasis is on the mineral commodity, its formal characteristics, the simplicity of its sliced excavation and, of course, the shrinking topography. Through these pictures, Burtynsky continued to sharpen his thematic focus and image resolution, while further refining composition.
Edward Burtynsky, Rock of Ages #15, Active Section, E.L. Smith Quarry, Barre, Vermont, USA, 1992.
Edward Burtynsky, Rock of Ages #7, Active Section, E.L. Smith Quarry, Barre, Vermont, USA, 1991.
With Quarries, the artist inserted an unexpected and less obvious example of the industrial landscape into the Western pictorial tradition, one that also implicated modernist form. The series attracted an enthusiastic reception and Burtynsky’s reputation expanded further as his work began showing signs of global reach.
TAILINGS, 1995–1996
Burtynsky returned to mines in the mid-1990s, now focused on resource extraction, producing a series of otherworldly hellscapes that increased his fame. His most dramatic and chilling photographs to date, they were widely reproduced. They are also the first unambiguous expression of the hybrid effect of attraction/repulsion that made him famous. Encountered in real life, such places would not give the same pleasure to the viewer that Burtynsky’s pictures afford. Although the images are fascinating for their surrealism—unfamiliar topographies of saturated subterranean hues—they are also chastening examples of human-poisoned ecosystems where nothing much can live.
Edward Burtynsky, Uranium Tailings #12, Elliott Lake, Ontario, 1995.
Edward Burtynsky, Nickel Tailings #31, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996.
The Tailings series was photographed primarily in Northern Ontario, a region of intensive mining and sparse settlement. There, Burtynsky produced some of his most arresting images of environmental aftermath. In Elliot Lake, the desolation resulting from uranium extraction appears almost staged: chemically burned, desiccated saplings stand fixed in soil of a radioactive pallor, evoking the stripped-down theatricality of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 play Waiting for Godot.6 Near Sudbury, at Copper Cliff, he turned to the by-products of nickel mining. Filigree rivulets and bending streams of heavy-metal effluent cut through darkened earth in fearsome reds, yielding some of the series’ most iconic images. Composed to resemble broad rivers, the channels seen in photographs such as Nickel Tailings #31, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996, were in fact narrow streamlets that could be stepped across. Despite the distortions that make them visually unnerving, the facts and consequence of the pollution remain undeniable.
Although rooted in Northern Ontario, the project marked the beginning of wider travels to Australia and Africa. With the help of geologists he met on successive mining sites, Burtynsky was able to expand his global catalogue of extraction, identifying spectacular tailings locations that would make for strong images. The high drama of these works significantly raised his profile in Canada, where landscape has long anchored national art. In 1996, the series was featured on the cover of Canadian Art magazine, where it was received as a forceful reconfiguration of the country’s dominant genre—one that redirected a tradition extending back to eighteenth-century topographical views toward the altered terrains of industrial modernity.
URBAN MINES, TIRE PILES, & OIL, 1997–2009
The Northern Ontario tailings pictures were followed by close-ups of metal recycling facilities, or what Burtynsky playfully classified as “urban mines.” A small series upon which he would later expand, Urban Mines, 1997, closed the loop of the modern production/consumption cycle.
With their close cropping, these images, including Densified Oil Drums #4, Hamilton, Ontario, 1997, are among Burtynsky’s most minimalist pictures. Discarded metal is tightly compacted into identical cubes reminiscent of mid-century reductivist sculptures by David Smith (1906–1965) and John Chamberlain (1927–2011). The more colourful pictures of densified oil filters and monochrome ferrous “bushelings” such as Densified Oil Filters #1, Hamilton, Ontario, 1997, are cropped to resemble “all-over” patterns in the abstract expressionist idiom epitomized by Jackson Pollock (1912–1956). The elimination of spatial context is more extreme in this series than in Quarries, a compositional trope that the artist would use to great effect in his later aerial works.
Edward Burtynsky, Densified Oil Drums #4, Hamilton, Ontario, 1997.
Edward Burtynsky, Densified Oil Filters #1, Hamilton, Ontario, 1997.
Jackson Pollock, Painting (Silver over Black, White, Yellow and Red), 1948 , painting on paper, mounted on canvas, 61 x 80 cm (sheet), Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Two years after producing Urban Mines, an article in The New Yorker by John McPhee about an immense tire dump became the genesis for Burtynsky’s Tire Piles of 1999. Titled “Duty of Care”—a reference to a British legal principle that producers of waste must ensure its safe handling—the essay discussed the Oxford Tire Recycling Company in Westley, California. Discarded tires numbered in the multiple millions there, making it among the world’s largest such facilities and irresistible to an industrial landscapist. The series initiates the broader study that Burtynsky would undertake over the next ten years on the cultural dimensions of fossil fuel that would result in the compilation titled Oil.
Utagawa Hiroshige, Mountain and River on the Kiso Road (Kisoji no yamakawa), 1857, colour woodblock print (triptych), 37 x 74.5 cm, Art Institute of Chicago.
Edward Burtynsky, Burning Tire Pile #1, Near Stockton, California, USA, 1999.
As industrial landscapes go, Tire Piles are something of a hybrid subject, whole vistas resulting not from extraction but from the waste produced by our industrial economy. A handful of Burtynsky’s photographs of the dump give it an oddly pastoral quality—composed to recall the perspective of Japanese woodcut prints by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) or Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849). In Oxford Tire Pile #8, Westley, California, USA, 1999, canyons of dark grey tires are separated by vertical patches of beige dirt and green grass. Burning Tire Pile #1, Near Stockton, California, USA, 1999, a sinister later image from the series, shows eerie hills of countless rubber rings made ominously hazy by smoke.
On September 22, 1999, only a few weeks after the artist had left the site, the mammoth Oxford Tire dump was struck by lightning, igniting a fire that would burn for a month. Unable to control the blaze, Stanislaus County authorities let it burn itself out. Not only did the smoke spread noxious particles over a broad region, affecting numerous communities, but large volumes of pyrolytic oil runoff also poisoned the soil and groundwater. The menacing nature of Burtynsky’s elegant compositions had become retroactively frightening by the time they were exhibited in 2000, for they had anticipated the catastrophe by documenting the great scale and nature of the fuel that would be consumed after the lightning strike. This split in timing—where the photographs were made before the disaster but viewed after it—makes Tire Piles unlike any other body of work in Burtynsky’s oeuvre, giving the images a distinct and unsettling aura of foreboding.
Edward Burtynsky shooting on location in the Oxford Tire pile.
For Tire Piles, Burtynsky was accompanied by an assistant. He would increasingly work with small teams from then on as his projects became more complex and his shooting locations more remote, requiring negotiated authorization. By this time in the late nineties, Burtynsky had begun gathering images that he could use toward a complex portrait of a single commodity: oil.
In his series Oil, begun in 1997 and continued for more than a decade, the artist embarked on an expansive pictorial adventure, producing new material while repurposing and recontextualizing some of his earlier work, including Tire Piles. To images of oil fields, refineries, pipelines, tailing ponds, automotive factories, tires, recycling facilities, so-called aircraft graveyards, and shipbreaking yards, Burtynsky added scenes of a more cultural nature: car lots, motorcycle rallies, racetracks, freeway interchanges, and highway service areas, such as in Breezewood, Pennsylvania, USA, 2008, and Trucker’s Jamboree #1, Walcott, Iowa, USA, 2003. The Oil series created a portrait of a complex and ubiquitous commodity—one that is deeply engrained in modern life.
As a fossil fuel formed over millions of years, petroleum releases energy—and carbon dioxide—when burned, contributing to atmospheric warming and climate change. Early in his career, Burtynsky had distanced himself from overt environmental advocacy, often explaining, “I’m an artist, not an environmentalist,” when questioned about his political stance; with Oil, he made the issue of unsustainability more overt. Without departing from his focus on the “evidence of man,” he exposed the scale, pervasiveness, and fragility of civilization structured around a finite resource, and its dire consequences for life on Earth.
Edward Burtynsky, Trucker's Jamboree #1, Walcott, Iowa, USA, 2003.
Edward Burtynsky, Oil Fields #19ab, Belridge, California, USA, 2003.
SHIPBREAKING, 2000
At the turn of the millennium, Burtynsky’s work expanded decisively into the international stage. The catalyst was Shipbreaking, 2000, a project informed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and regulatory shifts that followed. As single-hulled oil tankers became economically unviable, thousands were sold for scrap, causing a boon to the shipbreaking industry of South Asia where labour is cheap, demand for steel is high, and environmental legislation is lax. Burtynsky heard a documentary on CBC Radio about the aftermath of the Exxon disaster, and it piqued his curiosity about shipbreaking. In 2000, he travelled to Chittagong, Bangladesh—then home to the world’s largest breaker’s yard. It was his first sustained project in a developing country.
Edward Burtynsky, Shipbreaking #23, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000.
Edward Burtynsky, Recycling #10, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000.
The Shipbreaking project extended concerns first explored in Urban Mines, but on a vastly different scale. Ocean-going tankers, among the largest machines ever built, were dismantled by hand on tidal beaches. Some of Burtynsky’s photographs in Chittagong took a conventionally journalistic approach by including scenes of extreme labour and even portraits of workers. A popular image from the series shows a young “cutter” striking a foppish pose, leaning elegantly on twin blowtorches in front of a monstrous nautical abstraction. Other images featured oil-slicked footprints pressed into sand and workers labouring barefoot and without protective eyewear amid toxic fumes and unstable debris. Disparity between the mechanized industries that construct tankers and the manual labour that dismantles them forms the project’s central tension. The spectacle carries what might be called an “industrial sublime”—monumental scale traditionally associated with nature now attached to global commerce.
The devastated landscape transported Burtynsky back in history: “I felt like I was getting the vision that Charles Dickens had at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution…. Environmentally, the place was a disaster, and dangerous. It seemed like I was looking at what industry might have been like 100 or 150 years ago, before safety regulations were in place, before human life was ever considered as something precious.”7 The time spent in Chittagong influenced Burtynsky’s relationship to his subject by humanizing it more immediately. Upon his return to Toronto, he sent a shipment of safety gear such as welder’s goggles for distribution to the shipbreakers. Hailing from the working class himself, and with a work-related tragedy in his own family, he grew interested in the social consequences of his industrial muse. He gradually became more knowledgeable about the environmental, economic, and safety aspects of his subjects, and addressed such issues in public lectures about his work and in his publications.
Some of the pictures from Shipbreaking, such as Shipbreaking #13, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000, maintain the melancholic tone and scale of Romantic landscape painting, expanding the special irony for which Burtynsky was becoming known. And some are so reminiscent of abstract sculpture—evoking works by artists such as Anthony Caro (1924–2013), Richard Serra (1938–2024), Mark di Suvero (b.1933), and Robert Murray (b.1936)—that modern art is drawn into the equation of modern industry, along with justice, sustainability, and corporate greed.
Edward Burtynsky on site in Bangladesh.
The critical and institutional success of Shipbreaking proved to be a turning point for Burtynsky’s international recognition. He was forty-five when major institutions such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern in London, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. acquired works from this series. With his equal commitment to the aesthetic and technical aspects of photography, the painterly composition, dramatic colour, large scale, and razor-sharpness of the prints began to distinguish Burtynsky among his peers in the medium.
CHINA, 2002–2005
With his growing awareness of the human cost of industrial expansion, Burtynsky began thinking about his core subject more systemically. After the turn of the century, he embarked on a series of larger thematic projects that could tell a fuller pictorial story. The first of these was set in China. Travelling there five times, Burtynsky set out to document the country’s rapid industrialization following market reforms (begun in the late 1970s under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping) and its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001.8 The resulting pictures constitute a comprehensive depiction of a single nation’s industrial and concomitant economic boom.
Edward Burtynsky, Xiluodu Dam #9, Yangtze River, Yunnan Province, China, 2011.
Edward Burtynsky, Manufacturing #18, Cankun Factory, Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, 2005.
As if it were a second chance to document the Industrial Revolution, Burtynsky widened his approach beyond industry proper. For example, he photographed the epic dislocations and destruction necessitated by the Three Gorges Dam project—which warranted its own publication, Before the Flood (2003)—and other hydroelectric projects, such as the Xiluodu Dam in Yunnan Province. The scale and style of Chinese manufacturing and food processing also provided Burtynsky with some of his more familiar images, including Manufacturing #18, Cankun Factory, Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, China, 2005. Aside from shipbuilding, industrial agriculture, vast factories, recycling facilities, and infrastructure development, the artist documented older industrial facilities along with ancient traditional terrace farms to give a fuller picture of the booming nation’s economic diversity.
Edward Burtynsky, China Recycling #22, Portrait of a Woman in Blue, Zeguo, Zhejiang Province, China, 2004.
Diversity is also a good word to describe the pictures that emerged from Burtynsky’s time in China. There are many kinds of images, and some are more conventionally reportorial than artistic, following on the Shipbreaking project. Once again there are the occasional portraits of individuals and large groups of workers. With these pictures, the artist seems more interested in conveying information about China than in expanding the scope of the Western landscape tradition. Yet the theme remains industrial; everyone depicted is engaged in work.
By 2006, the project had resulted in a touring exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Canada, a book, and a feature film—all titled Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky.9 Directed by Toronto-based filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal and produced by cinematographer Nicholas de Pencier, Manufactured Landscapes was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and won a Genie Award for the Best Canadian Documentary in 2007.
Although audiences for photographic prints, books, and documentary films overlap, they are also distinct. Adapting his production to address all three, as Burtynsky did with the China project and Manufactured Landscapes, helped significantly expand his reach. As we shall see, China and its ancillary undertakings mark the beginning of Burtynsky’s meta-subject ventures, which include multiple disciplines and formats.
WATER, 2007–2013
More essential to life than fuel, water is vastly more abundant than oil and is constantly replenished by precipitation. But 97.5 per cent of it is salty ocean water unsuitable for human consumption. Nor is it tolerated by most plants or terrestrial animals. Unfortunately, the freshwater so many living things require is not evenly distributed across the planet. Because of climate change, some regions are now subject to chronic flooding and, therefore, drowning in freshwater. Others now suffer frequent and dangerous droughts. At our current population levels, and with growing desertification brought on by global warming—a result of the fuel consumption linked to unchecked development—universal access to freshwater has become critical.
The Earth’s population was 2.8 billion when Burtynsky was born in 1955—that number will likely have tripled in his lifetime. By 2007, this frightening rate of growth was an issue that Burtynsky was now raising regularly in public lectures to preface his work. “Our modern way of life would be sustainable, if there weren’t quite so many of us,” he often says. Overpopulation informs the Water pictures as a strong subtext. The series offers glimpses of an overpopulated species struggling to make the best of a worsening situation. The works multiply references to abstract art, uncomfortably associating the legacy of modernist aesthetics with the consequences of modern industry and overpopulation.
Edward Burtynsky, Marine Aquaculture #1, Luoyuan Bay, Fujian Province, China, 2012.
Edward Burtynsky photographing from a plane.
Unlike the typological variety of the Oil and China images, Water is made up mostly of vistas taken from aerial vantage points, typically oblique. Burtynsky had used aircraft before, for example in Oil, but with this project, the objective distance of great height becomes his typical point of view. Moreover, this perspective not only helped him increase the novelty of his images: it also enabled him to introduce formal ambiguity into unfamiliar subjects that can often be mistaken for abstract paintings. The effect is heightened—building on its first use in Quarries—by restrictive framing and judicious compositions that eliminate geographic information to deliberately obscure spatial context.
Edward Burtynsky, Pivot Irrigation #11, High Plains, Texas Panhandle, USA, 2011.
Like China and Oil, Water is a meta-subject. Encyclopedic in scope, the series covers dams, aquaculture, saltworks, irrigation, sediment-clogged estuaries, coastal oil spills, geothermal facilities, industrial agriculture, vast greenhouse complexes, land reclamation for waterfront housing, desert settlements, mass ritual bathing, aquatic funerary rites, erosion, dryland farming, stepwells, and polders. Among the many notable pictures are those depicting a type of irrigation called “centre pivot”: giant circles filling flat, rectilinear tracts of land. Shot from directly above, the 90-degree angle and property-line cropping makes them look like geometric abstractions in wood inlay.
Edward Burtynsky, Salinas #2, Cádiz, Spain, 2013.
Edward Burtynsky, Thjorsá River #1, Iceland, 2012.
Jean Dubuffet, Nunc Stans, 1965,vinyl paint on canvas, three panels, 161.9 x 274 cm (each); 161.9 x 821.7 cm (overall), Guggenheim.
Edward Burtynsky, Dryland Farming #2, Monegros County, Aragon, Spain, 2012.
Burtynsky evokes Expressionism in views of the colourful salinas of coastal Spain, meandering turquoise streams constrained by hatch-marked garden rows ringed with berms. More lyrically ethereal are the aerial vistas of blue Icelandic rivers silted into soft arabesques by erosion upstream. The style of Art Brut master Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) is vividly conjured by dryland farming in the semi-arid regions of Spain and Turkey where drought-tolerant cash crops thrive.
Watermark is the title of the feature film released in 2013, in which Burtynsky is listed as co-director with Jennifer Baichwal. Like Manufactured Landscapes before it, the film won awards; it was also featured in prestigious events such as the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale).
Coinciding with the making of the Water series, Burtynsky worked on creating a prize that would celebrate Canadian photographers. In 2010, he co-founded the Scotiabank Photography Award, consisting of a $50,000 cash prize, a solo exhibition, and a career-spanning monograph published by German art book publisher Steidl. Awarded annually, it recognizes Canadian artists who have made outstanding contributions to the field of photography. Since its inauguration, the Scotiabank Photography Award has become Canada’s top prize for artists working in the medium. Recipients include Lynne Cohen (1944–2014) in 2011, Arnaud Maggs (1926–2012) in 2012, Suzy Lake (b.1947) in 2016, Jin-me Yoon (b.1961) in 2022, Ken Lum (b.1956) in 2023, and Dawit L. Petros (b.1972) in 2025.
SALT PANS, 2016
With time, Burtynsky’s use of aircraft to create his images led to a tendency to avoid horizon lines which, in turn, prompted renewed experimentation with pictorial form. His lifelong interest in non-objective abstraction began to bear fruit in his own work. He departed from the conventions of landscape art in the salt pans he photographed in Western India in 2016. Intrigued by their odd rectilinearity, variable shading, and the inscrutable fretwork of adjacent lines in the dirt, Burtynsky photographed numerous salt pans in Gujarat from oblique angles high in the air. Their weird resemblance to old-school photographic negatives may have also got his attention. Although this water-themed body of work came after the Water project, it represents a return to the single-subject series and would be integrated into larger projects later. It is also a strong addition to the artist’s repertoire of photographs that blur into abstraction. The Salt Pans project resulted in a book titled Edward Burtynsky: Salt Pans – Little Rann of Kutch, Gujarat, India (2016), that features thirty-one aerial photos.
Edward Burtynsky, Salt Pan #19, Little Ran of Kutch, Gujarat, India, 2016.
Edward Burtynsky, Salt Pan #20, Little Ran of Kutch, Gujarat, India, 2016.
The Great Rann of Kutch, located in India’s north-western Gujarat state, is among the world’s largest seasonal salt deserts. Following the monsoons, it temporarily becomes a wetland vital to migratory water birds such as flamingos and cranes. During evaporation, a thick saline crust forms on the surface, fed primarily by brackish groundwater. Diesel-powered pumps draw more saline water to the surface, where it evaporates in “pats” and is then harvested by hand. Gujarat produces most of India’s salt, much of it from the Rann region.10
Salt harvesting here is artisanal, carried out by tens of thousands of Agariyas, a Dalit community that has long been socially marginalized and economically exploited by India’s enduring caste system. Much of this work is concentrated in the Little Rann of Kutch, to the southeast, which faces fewer environmental restrictions than the more protected Great Rann. The harvest is seasonal and the shelters for workers and their families rudimentary, without benefit of basic utilities such as plumbing or electricity. Working conditions often have dire consequences for health: blindness, skin disease, and heat stroke are common, while the scarcity of potable water and the absence of plumbing leads to poisoning and a high rate of infant mortality. Diesel pollution from the motorized pumps is also an issue. Moreover, the water table is dwindling from over-pumping. Drilling past the brackish water table causes saline intrusion into the freshwater aquifer beneath it, leading to conflicts between the salt harvesters and neighbouring farmers who rely on the aquifer to irrigate their crops.
The strange elegance of these moody and inscrutable pictures doesn’t directly express the human toll of the centuries-old activity. The plight of the Agariya has been well-documented elsewhere, however, so Burtynsky restricts these images to the eerie forms that result from their labour and lets the injustices exposed by others explain the pictures’ elegiac tone.11
Edward Burtynsky, Salt Pan #10, Little Ran of Kutch, Gujarat, India, 2016.
ANTHROPOCENE, 2018
The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch to succeed the Holocene (also known as the “most recent epoch”), which began at the end of the last ice age. Anthropos is Greek for human, and humans, the argument goes, are now the primary force shaping Earth’s systems. Industrialization, urbanization, mass extinctions, and climate change are all the result of human activity, and they have had a transformative impact on our planetary habitat.
Geologists of the Anthropocene Working Group claim that the evidence is compelling enough to warrant announcing a new geological epoch. They date its beginning to the mid-twentieth century and the “Great Acceleration” that followed the Second World War, and to the atomic bomb tests that left a residue of radioactive isotopes across the planet. Although the concept is increasingly used in the scientific community and in popular culture, the Anthropocene has yet to be officially recognized by the International Union of Geological Sciences, the field’s governing body.12
Edward Burtynsky and team working on site.
Edward Burtynsky, Uralkali Potash Mine #2, Berezniki, Russia, 2017.
Burtynsky’s next meta-subject series was the Anthropocene project structured around six categories of evidence supporting the claim. The first, “Terraforming,” refers to the large-scale reshaping of the Earth’s surface by human industry, such as open-pit mining, mountaintop removal, and land reclamation. The second, “Anthroturbation,” references disturbance of Earth’s strata by humans through tunnelling, excavation, mining, and urban infrastructure. The third, “Technofossils,” are human-made objects—such as plastics, aluminum, and electronic debris—that will persist in the geologic record. The fourth, “Synthetic Biology,” is the alteration or creation of life forms through genetic engineering, or human intervention in evolutionary and ecological systems. The fifth, “Climate Change,” addresses human-generated carbon emissions that alter the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans, directly affecting weather patterns. Finally, the sixth, “Extinction,” is the accelerated loss of biodiversity through human activity such as overhunting, habitat loss, or inadvertent poisoning.
The Anthropocene project is Burtynsky’s most pedagogical effort to date, one that provides a retrospective blueprint for his oeuvre as a whole. With his reputation and celebrity well anchored, and after decades of commercial success, experience had made the artist knowledgeable and clear-eyed about his subject and its consequences. This meta-subject work resulted in an exhibition of prints, a book, and a third collaboration with Baichwal and de Pencier. Production, however, was consolidated: for convenience and efficiency, the photographs and the film were often produced simultaneously in the twenty countries covered by the project.
Edward Burtynsky, Salt Pond #4, near Naglou Sam Sam, Senegal, 2019.
More systematic in its approach to exploring the issues that have preoccupied him—exploitation of natural resources and of people, the inadvertent beauty produced by utilitarian industry—it does not diverge from the attraction/repulsion aesthetic that distinguishes his work. The film, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, 2018, won multiple awards after having been screened in four festivals, including TIFF, the Sundance Film Festival, and the Berlinale.13 Highly rated, it was widely seen and expanded the artist’s audience well beyond the worlds of art and photography.
AFRICAN STUDIES, 2015–2019
Overlapping with the Anthropocene project, Burtynsky travelled numerous times to Africa, gathering aerial shots that would give an entirely new perspective on humanity’s primordial nursery. The ten African countries photographed were all Sub-Saharan: Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania. More easily mistaken for abstract paintings than his earlier series, his pictures of Africa are notable for the many images taken from directly above the subject, or from angles that exclude the horizon, further obscuring them as landscapes. The artist also relies on the unfamiliarity of his scenes, for example, artisanal salt-panning sites along the Atlantic coast with their circular patterns and vivid colours.
Edward Burtynsky, BMW Assembly Plant #1, Rosslyn, Pretoria, South Africa, 2018.
Edward Burtynsky, Ilakaka Sapphire Mine #1, Ilakaka, Madagascar, 2019.
Edward Burtynsky, Tsaus Mountains #3, Sperrgebiet, Namibia, 2018.
Edward Burtynsky, Sand Dunes #1, Sossusvlei, of Namib Desert, Namibia, 2018.
Unlike China with its many sociological, or non-landscape scenes that include figures or details of infrastructure, African Studies is more sparing in its representation of people, and most images are taken from distances that make the subject more difficult to identify. Aside from a small number of works showing the interiors of Chinese and German factories in Africa, and images of artisanal mining in Madagascar, this series feels like a return to his earlier rhythm of exploring unpopulated places. Given that the African landscape isn’t conventionally depicted this way—remote industrial locations shot from the air—Burtynsky alters our understanding of it. Many of the scenes show mining operations on a continent known for its mineralogical diversity and richness. But mixed into the group are natural landscapes where the strangeness has no connection to human activity. Two examples are the ruffled strata of the Tsaus Mountains in Namibia, and the erratic sand dunes in the Namib Desert.
The illusion of tactility in both the natural and industrial scenes is more pronounced than in earlier work. Now using ultra-high-resolution medium-format digital cameras, Burtynsky introduces a greater textural quality to his flat surfaces, increasing their resemblance to painting but, paradoxically, also increasing their verisimilitude. This heightens the tension between aesthetics and documentation. It should be noted that Burtynsky only gradually converted to working digitally, increasingly using it as the new technology became more robust and chromatically comprehensive.
During this time, Burtynsky began experimenting with what he refers to as “Photography 3.0,” or the use of augmented reality (AR) technology in the production of images.14 He invested in the development of AVARA, a downloadable smartphone app for viewing pre-recorded three-dimensional objects in the round. Among the notable works that Burtynsky produced in this medium is Building Ivory Tusk Mound, April 25, Nairobi, Kenya, 2016, which was created as part of the Anthropocene project. The image depicts a large pile of elephant tusks before it was burned by the government of Kenya, which had confiscated them from poachers. Although these works seem ancillary to his main corpus, they are a testament to an artist who is constantly pushing the boundaries of his medium and its technological extensions.
Edward Burtynsky, Building Ivory Tusk Mound, April 25, Nairobi, Kenya, 2016.
Edward Burtynsky and team in Nairobi, Kenya.
COVID-19 & BEYOND
At the end of 2019, after his marriage with Jeannie Baxter ended in an amicable divorce, Burtynsky married lawyer Julia Johnston who would also become a key collaborator. A major work of public art that emerged during this period was In the Wake of Progress, 2022, a monumental multi-projection video retrospective. The work made its public debut on June 11, 2022, as the marquee presentation for the Luminato Festival in Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square. Combining music with video and photography, In the Wake of Progress took over the massive advertising screens in the square, transforming the site into an immersive art work. A spectacular piece, literally, it is best understood as a summation of the artist’s lifelong exploration of his project: the aestheticization of advanced industrial production that has transformed our planet. Its initial presentation in a commercial hub coincided, forebodingly, with the COVID-19 pandemic that shrank our once vast habitat by spreading to almost every corner of the world within in a matter of days—exposing the vulnerability of our species.
Installation view of In the Wake of Progress in Yonge-Dundas Square, 2022.
During the pandemic, when working closely with teams and renting aircraft became impossible, Burtynsky turned to the landscape near a recently acquired summer home in Central Ontario. With his otherwise transcontinental practice grounded, he was confined to a single region for the first time since adolescence. Like many of us, Burtynsky became retrospective while under confinement. The photographs that make up the series Natural Order are a reprise of his earliest ideas as a budding landscape artist. The work harkens to the wind-flattened grass patterns and lyricized bogs that he photographed on the Niagara Escarpment in the late 1970s. The pictures represent a technical breakthrough that relates to the artist’s signature rejection of depth-of-field effects. With their deep, penetrating focus, these landscapes have an inherent strangeness that belies their equally deep familiarity for Burtynsky’s fellow Ontarians.
Edward Burtynsky, Grasses, Bruce Peninsula, Ontario, Canada, 1981.
Edward Burtynsky, Natural Order #14, Grey County, Ontario, Canada, 2020.
Edward Burtynsky, Coast Mountains #3, The Black Tusk, British Columbia, Canada, 2023.
Following Natural Order, and after the lifting of travel restrictions introduced during the pandemic, Burtynsky journeyed to the Canadian Rockies to photograph mountain peaks. Besides the extreme detail of these images that puts them at the ever-advancing technical forefront of his medium, what distinguishes them from other photographs is the stark evidence of the effects of climate change. With his denuded mountain peaks—snow caps that have lost their snow and glaciers that, for millions of years, hid their now craggy surfaces—Burtynsky reveals how shifting global weather patterns threaten the continuity of life in whole regions. Like the landscapes of Natural Order, but for reasons less mediated by technology, we have also never seen such things before.
Now in his seventies, Burtynsky has had a long and rich career exploring art’s informative potential and social relevance. Over four decades, he has honed a rigorous large-format photographic practice while refining an aesthetic sensibility that reconciles formal beauty with evidence of our changing world. His images—at once seductive and unsettling—demonstrate an unwavering commitment to examining the systems of extraction, production, and consumption that shape modernity.
It is hard to predict where a photographer’s gaze will turn next, even an artist of Burtynsky’s rigour and coherence. What is certain is that, with a practice founded on adaptation to technological, sociological, and ecological change, the habitat made mutable by human industry is unlikely to exhaust the interest of so fervent and gifted a witness.