Edward Burtynsky

Edward Burtynsky

“[we] come from nature.…There is an importance to [having] a certain reverence for what nature is because we are connected to it... If we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves.” - EB

“While trying to accommodate the growing needs of an expanding, and very thirsty civilisation, we are reshaping the Earth in colossal ways. In this new and powerful role over the planet, we are also capable of engineering our own demise. We have to learn to think more long-term about the consequences of what we are doing, while we are doing it. My hope is that these pictures will stimulate a process of thinking about something essential to our survival; something we often take for granted—until it’s gone.”

"I wanted to understand water: what it is, and what it leaves behind when we're gone. I wanted to understand our use and misuse of it. I wanted to trace the evidence of global thirst and threatened sources. Water is part of a pattern I've watched unfold throughout my career. I document landscapes that, whether you think of them as beautiful or monstrous, or as some strange combination of the two, are clearly not vistas of an inexhaustible, sustainable world."
(Walrus, October 2013)

This picture is insane! It looks like trees growing from the bottom area of the picture. The caption helps to tell what the photo is – the Colorado river delta. To me it looks other worldly. I have never seen a photograph similar to this before. It makes me wonder how he photographed it and whether he digitally manipulated it.if it is real of not?

His aerial photographs are so stable and bright; I wonder how he shot them, as my own exploits with large format tell me that I often need long exposures to get photographs properly exposed.

This shows water as a powerful force of nature and like he says in the statement, one that mankind is controlling in an explosive way. One thinks of a tap pouring water into a basin or water pouring out of a shower, and in this it is more like water thundering over a waterfall, but even more powerful as the water is forced forwards and it defies gravity.

OIL - Artist’s Statement

"When I first started photographing industry it was out of a sense of awe at what we as a species were up to. Our achievements became a source of infinite possibilities. But time goes on, and that flush of wonder began to turn. The car that I drove cross-country began to represent not only freedom, but also something much more conflicted. I began to think about oil itself: as both the source of energy that makes everything possible, and as a source of dread, for its ongoing endangerment of our habitat.

in the foreground we can see oil spilling into the water around which there are banks that have all been cut into and changed and broken. In the distance we see the factory spilling fumes into the atmosphere

The curves of the roads lead the eyes into the road, much as the bends in the road lead the driver into the city. I think the image is successful due to the absurdity of the road planning.

This picture is impressive, the bold black takes up most of the frame with dirt at the bottom, with a person that is almost camouflaged to the dirt with the spillage of dirt on the black metal. It highlights his plight

I like the symmetrical view point in this picture. The bold red ship in the middle third on both axises, the ships on either side

This picture looks like bright lava flowing, but it is iron flowing in a river from an industrial plant.

All these photographs are so impressive, they show a large view while still keeping small details large enough and viewable.

HOMESTEADS: From the beginning of his career, Burtynsky was attuned to the delicate balance that exists between humans and the environment. We can see this clearly in a series of photographs he called "Homesteads." The title evokes images of the self-reliant pioneers of the nineteenth century, a theme that presents itself in images such as Homesteads #30. In the "Homesteads" series, the precise geographic location, whether in British Columbia, Alberta, Montana, or upstate New York, is not really significant, since the primary elements remain the same: the small homes and outbuildings dotting the nearly empty land. The central meaning of these pictures is the rudimentary interaction between people and the land.

The concept of the photographs not needing a specific location to cement them is inspiring to me that my photographs do not need a location or to represent a specific point in time to have context. They are meant to represent anytime.

EARLY LANDSCAPES: Burtynsky’s evolving compositional strategies were also informed by a marked desire to explore how the visual properties of modernist painting might be made relevant to colour landscape photography. Foremost in his mind was the Abstract Expressionist treatment of pictorial space as a dense, compressed field evenly spread across the entire surface of a large composition. Emphasising these pictorial concerns within the landscape tradition was for him another way to contribute to the field and to assert the relevance of painting to his photographic practice.

Black text from Burtynskys Website: http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/

Blue text my thoughts, reflections and analysis