A photographic witness for the environment
At first glance, much of Edward Burtynsky’s work can appear as things of beauty — abstract swirls of colour, tree branches reaching out over a canvas, or geometric patterns arrayed liked clocks on a wall.
A closer look reveals the truth — there is nothing abstract about them. These are landscape photographs, some taken from a helicopter 800 feet above ground.
And they are not things of beauty. They are scenes of devastation, testaments to humanity’s unique ability to alter the environment in irreversible ways — open-pit mines, tailing ponds, quarries, dams, oilfields and factories.
Once the reality sets in, the effect can be shocking as hidden details, like tiny little trucks and earth moving machines, come into focus.
“That’s what I do as an artist,” Burtynsky says in an interview with The Spectator. “I’m trying to find those moments where visually you are arrested, where you stop and become visually connected to something.
“Without connection, there is no communication and without communication, I don’t believe that you’re actually engaged with an audience. Engagement is always about communication.”
Burtynsky, a St. Catharines native now based in Toronto, is one of Canada’s best known artists, internationally acclaimed for the environmental nature of his work.
His photos hang in the National Gallery of Canada and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was made an Officer of the Order on Canada in 2006 and holds seven honorary doctorates.
Two feature length documentaries have been made about his work. A third is in the works.
The Art Gallery of Hamilton is fortunate to have 78 of Burtynsky’s photos in its collection, all but two of them gifts of the artist, most coming in a 2015 donation.
Twenty two are now on display at the AGH in an exhibition called “Witness.”
The news has quickly spread among local Burtynsky fans as 300 tickets have already sold out for an hour-long artist’s talk and screening of the documentary “Watermark,” scheduled Jan. 27 at the Lincoln Alexander Centre.
“Witness,” put together by AGH curator Melissa Bennett, covers more than 35 years of Burtynsky’s career, stretching back to the early ’80s in western Canada to his 2016 aerial photographs of salt pans in India.
As a child, Burtynsky, 62, gained an appreciation for our ability to reform nature while visiting his father’s workplace at the GMC auto plant in St. Catharines. His father, who died when Burtynsky was just 15, worked in an area of the plant where PCBs were in use.
“I ended up working in the same plant where my father worked, removing the PCBs,” he recalls. “It was unnerving.”
Burtynsky picked up photography at an early age when his father installed a darkroom in their home. Together they learned the basics of photography.
Burtynsky went on to formally