Edward Burtynsky
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. 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.
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