Edward Burtynsky valuation
Photographs the places industry has remade — quarries, mines, dams, oil fields — at the scale of the change.
Edward Burtynsky was born at St Catharines in Ontario in 1955 to Ukrainian immigrant parents, studied photography at Ryerson in Toronto, and in 1985 founded Toronto Image Works, a darkroom and imaging centre.
What a work by Edward Burtynsky is worth
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Bio
Edward Burtynsky was born at St Catharines in Ontario in 1955 to Ukrainian immigrant parents, studied photography at Ryerson in Toronto, and in 1985 founded Toronto Image Works, a darkroom and imaging centre. The subject for forty years has been what he calls manufactured landscapes: stone quarries in Vermont, nickel tailings at Sudbury, oil fields, the shipbreaking beaches of Chittagong, the Three Gorges Dam, salt pans and vast Chinese factories. The pictures are made with a large-format view camera from raised vantage points, and later from helicopters and drones, so a place reads almost as a map. Films made with Jennifer Baichwal, among them Manufactured Landscapes and Anthropocene, carried the work to a far wider audience.
Everything is editioned, and the same image is typically issued in several sizes, each with its own edition, so the dimensions and the edition number identify the work. Earlier prints are chromogenic and later ones are pigment inkjet prints, and the two are not interchangeable even for the same image. The largest are very large indeed and are often mounted, which makes surface scuffs, dented corners and fading from display the practical concerns. Signature, title, date and edition are normally on a label on the reverse or on the certificate, and the Toronto studio is the reference for edition records.
Niagara College, the TED Prize and Anthropocene
Burtynsky took a diploma in graphic design at Niagara College in Welland before Ryerson, and his earliest photographs, made in Ontario and western Canada under the influence of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Carleton Watkins, were given to the university's Image Centre. Manufactured Landscapes, shown in 2003, gathered more than 60 large images, many of them 48 by 60 inches.
Later series include Oil, from 1999 to 2010, China, from 2004 to 2006, Water, from 2009 to 2013, and Anthropocene, from 2014 to 2018. He won the TED Prize in 2005 and the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2016.
The contemplated moment, the films and Extraction/Abstraction
Until about 2007 he worked with a 4 by 5 inch field camera on sheet film, and the prints range from 18 by 22 inches to 60 by 80; he now uses a high-resolution digital medium-format camera. He calls the act of taking a picture the contemplated moment, against Cartier-Bresson's decisive one. Jennifer Baichwal's film Manufactured Landscapes, made about him in 2006, went to Sundance, and the two went on to direct Watermark in 2013 and, with Nicholas de Pencier, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, which opened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2018.
The Brooklyn Museum showed Manufactured Landscapes in 2005 and 2006, the Anthropocene exhibitions opened at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada in 2018, and Extraction/Abstraction came to the Saatchi Gallery in London in 2024. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2006, named Master of Photography at Photo London in 2018 and inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame in 2022.
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