Edward Burtynsky by Sundaram Tagore Gallery

EDWARD BURTYNSKY

GALLERY MISSION Established in 2000, Sundaram Tagore Gallery is devoted to examining the exchange of ideas between Western and non-Western cultures. We focus on developing exhibitions and hosting not-for-profit events that encourage spiritual, social and aesthetic dialogues. In a world where communication is instant and cultures are colliding and melding as never before, our goal is to provide venues for art that transcend boundaries of all sorts. With galleries in New York, Beverly Hills and Hong Kong, our interest in cross-cultural exchange extends beyond the visual arts into many other disciplines, including poetry, literature, performance art, film and music.

Nickel Tailings #31, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996, chromogenic print, 18 x 22 inches

EXPLORING THE RESIDUAL LANDSCAPE Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis. These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desireâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Edward Burtynsky

EDWARD BURTYNSKY By Francis Hodgson It used to be that photographs were made locally and consumed locally. Local studios, newsmen serving on local papers, those networks were close and small. Later, photographs were made locally and consumed globally. Photojournalists could cover a war and send pictures back (even if it meant begging a colleague to carry a few rolls of film) to a newspaper which could reach much of the world in the next days. Those networks were beginning to spread far and wide. Edward Burtynsky stands as a pioneer of the new generation, who make pictures globally to be consumed globally. Photographers have always traveled—it’s not just that Burtynsky can get on an aeroplane and work in Australia or China, about as far from his home in Canada as it’s possible to get. It’s more that each new body of work connects intellectually to the previous ones, and that what interests him is not necessarily this particular mine or that particular highway. Burtynsky’s subject matter is truly global. He finds connections, between consumption and waste, between industries dying and new ones

being brought into existence. Those connections are real. When Burtynsky photographs the ships’ graveyard in Chittagong, Bangladesh, in the year 2000, he knows already that the massive shipyards at Qili, near Wenzhou on the delta of the Yangtze in China, will likely need his attention in the future. Those shipyards produce two hundred, even two hundred and fifty ships per year (and, incredibly, they do so almost wholly for the booming internal Chinese market). That’s an irresistible contrast, even though Burtynsky doesn’t get to Qili until 2005. Like the great photographer-economist Sebastião Salgado, Burtynsky is binding together stories with hundred-year spans, of massive macro-economic shifts. Where Salgado tackles the global question of migration, for example, Burtynsky takes on the entire history of oil. It is not mere ambition nor megalomania that impels a man to work on that kind of scale. It is the scale that our world now requires. If you look at the brilliant early series on the Railcuts, you will be struck by the scale at which Burtynsky was happy to work, even then.

In appalling terrain, he didn’t merely go and find these (powerfully significant) scars on the land, he went looking for the angles from which they could be seen as in a Petri dish. It doesn’t matter whether he climbed the mountains opposite, or rode in helicopters; the vision was as big as that of the railway engineers themselves, who in the middle of the nineteenth century dared to dream that picks, shovels, and a little dynamite could etch a trading route across the great Canadian continent. Burtynsky is like that, too. He sees very big patterns, not just in the lethal sludges of the Alberta tar sands or the monstrous blocks of the marble quarries, but in the connections between them. A lesser artist would have spent a lot of effort writing (or commissioning) texts to go with his pictures. Burtynsky doesn’t do that: He leaves the pictures open enough. They’re not a treatise or a government green paper. But they’re not just neutral, either. It would be hard to look down into the crater of the Silver Lake operations at Lake Lefroy in Western Australia and think only of profit. If ever a landscape

Mt. Whaleback #1, Newman, Western Australia, 2007, chromogenic print, 48 x 96 inches

looked cancerous, that’s it. No matter who you are, whatever your background or your culture, Burtynsky has found a way to address you. It’s not even “you.” It’s “us all.” These pictures are made to be received globally, too. Edward Burtynsky was raised in St. Catharines, Ontario, a General Motors town. That may have colored his vision, no doubt, and he has thought so in several interviews in the past. The family sedan in which one felt so private, so individual, was made just over the local fence by monstrous machinery which knew neither of privacy nor of individuality but pressed and ground steel and

men equally. This was a powerful idea, and its echoes can still be felt like a deep bass hum in many of Burtynsky’s pictures. It is the terrific near abstraction of massive industrial processes that gives them their beauty and the pimply detail in the lives of men which gives us ours. Those two beauties collide. There are only rarely studies of individuals in Burtynsky’s work. But within every picture (at least since he stopped many years ago being a “sublime” landscape photographer in the manner of Ansel Adams) there crowd thousands of women and men. The workers, the consumers, the mine-owners

and finance brokers, the people whose fields were covered in tarmac or drowned under a reservoir.… I think of them as a kind of unphotographed predella at the foot of each picture, an Avernal footnote in the manner of Hieronymus Bosch, unseen but impossible to avoid. It’s partly precisely this question of scale. I remember my own hilarity at finding in Burtynsky’s 2005 diptych of the absurdly large car park of Volkswagens in Shanghai a tiny little figure, an employee, waiting beside a car with the hood up. Mechanical fault? Unplanned delay in the process of manufacture and delivery?

Shipbreaking #17, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000, chromogenic print, 22.5 x 45 inches

Unthinkable. By including this little figure in his edit (although admittedly I did have to crawl over his picture with a magnifying glass to find it), Burtynsky adds a brilliant and unexpected touch. For these are narrative pictures too. Each one is made up of thousands of tiny human stories. To forget that, and think only of tonnages and mileages and profit margins is to miss the point. To get caught up in one of these pictures is certainly to want to know about tonnages displaced and what on earth that Heath Robinson machine can possibly do. But thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not all. In his grandiose near-abstraction of enormous patterns,

Burtynsky consistently finds the little scratches and markings of we little men, heaving and lumping away. Those ships in Chittagong are not dismantled by heavy equipment. They are taken apart, piece by piece, by little men engaged on thoroughly dangerous work for a pittance. Here are the subtlest palettes and the most brutal working conditions; the most inspiring plummeting views and reckless despoliation. You wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t find one-liners in these pictures. They are not posters, made to ram home one simple message. By their constant counterpoint between tiny details and big ideas, they each engage a viewer

much longer than is usual in photographs. They are beautiful pictures of sometimes hideous places. They are richly and honorably ambivalent. Not the least of the many ambiguities in this remarkable group of pictures is the question of the photographerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own position. Is he an environmentalist, patently disapproving of the monstrous quarries and piles of waste material to be recycled in painful and dangerous processes? Or is he as the Piranesi of the Carceri, reveling in an architecture that should by rights be impossible? Is he indeed, as I find myself sometimes before his images, a little child, awestruck and gladdened

by the sheer monstrous scale of the vast train set and construction toys he has found before him? To my eye, one of the strengths of these pictures is that they do remain open. Read them one way at first and you’ll find the opposite in them later. Many are made under romantic lighting, of early season and early day or late season and late day. Yet they are bold industrial views of a kind more usually seen in black and white, or in the flat, even color of the corporate annual report. They simply scream for metaphorical readings. There is a crunch in a Burtynsky photograph when admiration and repulsion are in balance. Precisely the same crunch as one gets in Richard Misrach’s Desert Cantos. Look at the magnificent rubber cliffs from the Oxford Tire Piles. Impossible to view them without oldfashioned photographic wonder, simply that such a thing could be. Equally, impossible to view them without a shudder. In Tire Pile #9, Burtynsky shifts the perspective edgily, adding a slithery vertigo to the already impressive list of discomforts we find in the photograph.

Burtynsky has had a particular affinity for quarries, and I think has done some of his best thinking about them. In Rock of Ages #26 (an abandoned section of the E.L. Smith quarry in Barre, Vermont), the repeated motif of the tidy regular splits in the rock face from which the blocks are cut looks exactly like tightly fitting blocks of stone in architecture of every kind. It looks (as Burtynsky himself reminds us in the apartment complex in Jiangjunao in Hong Kong) like the modular prefabricated construction that springs up everywhere. It is impossible not to see Mycenae or the Wailing Wall or Cheops represented in negative in this massive hollowedout stonework. The controlled blasting that made these rocky precipices is not so different from the uncontrolled blasting that took apart lower Manhattan on 9/11. The network of cables and hoses and ropes and hawsers that dangles over the faces of every active quarry can easily be seen as tiny map-lines, the roads and rivers and railways that articulate and link the mountain surfaces. Sometimes it’s difficult in the pictures to read the planes of rock themselves. Are they

horizontal, or vertical? Vertigo is never far away from Burtynsky’s viewer. Again and again, the idea presents itself in front of the quarry pictures of these vast holes being upside-down versions of our vast buildings. Here’s a hollowed out Taj Mahal; there an Empire State Building going downward. But if there are metaphors of this kind at every turn in Burtynsky’s work, there are also plain facts. For twenty-five years or more, Edward Burtynsky has brought back factual reports from around the world, of the way that it actually is. In practical terms, to get from the Homestead #32 that Burtynsky viewed from the elevated section of Highway 8 in British Columbia in 1985 to the McDonald’s he photographed in Breezewood, Pennsylvania, in 2008, you have to take something like the Highway #5 he saw in Los Angeles in 2003. It is just so. For economic and historical reasons that are going to be very painful to undo, people in North America feel entitled to cheap sandwiches whenever they want them, and that being so, these three pictures are connected in fact. Burtynsky is a painter, a poet. But he’s also a reporter of the highest order.

There are lots of parallels for this mixture. To those raised in English letters, Dickens leaps to mind. Charles Dickens—whose strong moral tone is normally mixed in with his sheer enthusiasm for bustle, and whose pleasure in what he describes is perhaps only less than his pleasure in the business of describing it—is not a fanciful name to bring into view when thinking about Burtynsky. The Dickens of Household Words was one of the great reporters, of course, trenchant as the great H.L. Mencken (although of a considerably different political stamp). Dickens has many subjects, but again and again he returns to the broad effects on people and on societies of the whirling pace of change. Dickens is really a chronicler of the Industrial Revolution. Early in his writing, Mr. Pickwick and his gang of friends travel by stagecoach; but by the time Mr. Dombey needs to go to Leamington, he goes by train: “Everything around is blackened. There are pools of dark water, muddy lanes and miserable habitations far below. There

are jagged walls and falling houses close at hand, and through the battered roofs and broken windows, wretched rooms are seen, where want and fever hide themselves in many wretched shapes, while smoke and crowded gables, and distorted chimneys, and deformity of brick and mortar penning up deformity of mind and body, choke the murky distance. As Mr. Dombey looks out of his carriage window, it is never in his thoughts that the monster who has brought him there [i.e. the new railway] has let the light of day in on these things: not made nor caused them.” 1 In such passages as this, Dickens is a purely visual writer. One thinks also of the furious description of the Black Country around Birmingham in his Old Curiosity Shop and of many other passages. This is a great artist managing to blend acute observation, fair description, and complex judgment all in the same passage, and I do think that the parallel is helpful in trying to identify

the processes in Burtynsky. There are numerous photographs of Dickens, but I know of no evidence that he used a camera himself; if he had done, is it fanciful to think that he would have made the mid-nineteenth-century equivalent of what Burtynsky has made? Burtynsky’s subject is the new industrial revolution. It is already clear that the new one will be just as world shaking as Dickens’ one. Is it going to be a zero-sum game? Will the rich countries be obliged in the end to accept lower standards of living as the emerging countries grapple toward an improvement in their own? Is there a viable alternative to growth as the driving political philosophy of the entire trading world? These are huge questions. They used to be in the proper sense abstractions. It always used to be said that it was hard to photograph good news, because bad news was always more concrete. And it is true, or half-true. Any fool can photograph the hideous effects of an industrial strike or a bomb-strike. But Burtynsky is one of those who have started to turn it around. He deals in big economic abstractions, and they imply good news as much as bad.

Shanghai City Panorama, Shanghai, China, 2004, chromogenic print, 26.5 x 60 inches

When we can actually see as Burtynsky lets us see, abstract figures about the consumption of oil in the US as compared to China (for example) are no longer so abstract. Some of what he is showing certainly represents good news: better jobs, better human rights, better chances…. Once you photograph on the scale that Burtynsky does, even the old stereotypes begin to quake and waver. This is a photographer of progress, and progress works for better or for worse, for good and for ill. One of the chapters in Burtynsky’s series on the oil industry is called The End of Oil. That’s a huge story. It’s too big for most thinkers, too big by far for most governments. Yet it is just possible that in the measured collision in Edward

Burtynsky’s work over many years, between careful observation and conscientious objection, it may have just found its chronicler. And like Dickens, it is fair to note, Burtynsky finds that his supremely complex messages are more easily given and received when they are clothed in great beauty.

contributor to The Economist. He was vice president for content development at Eyestorm, the online art dealer, and before that was the founding European creative director for Photonica, a major photographic stock library.

1. Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, cap xx (p. 355 in the Penguin English Library edition of 1970, reprinted 1981).

Francis Hodgson writes on photography for the Financial Times and was until 2009 the head of the photographs department at Sotheby’s in London. He has been a writer on photography for many years, including stints as contributing editor on photography for Art Review, and a regular

Carrara Marble Quarries #15, Carrara, Italy, 1993, chromogenic print, 48 x 60 inches

Rock of Ages #6, Abandoned Granite Quarry, Rock of Ages Quarry, Barre, Vermont, 1991, chromogenic print, 40 x 50 inches

Rock of Ages #26, Abandoned Section, E.L. Smith Quarry, Barre, Vermont, 1991, chromogenic print, 27 x 34 inches

Homesteads #32, View from Highway 8, British Columbia, 1985, chromogenic print, 27 x 34 inches

Oil Fields #22, Cold Lake Production Project, Aberta, 2001, chromogenic print, 58.75 x 73.75 inches

Highway #2, Intersection 105 and 110, Los Angeles, California, 2003, chromogenic print, 39 x 49 inches

Silver Lake Operations #1, Lake Lefroy, Western Australia, 2007, chromogenic print, 27 x 34 inches

Oil Fields #27, Bakersfield, California, 2004, chromogenic print, 27 x 34 inches

Highway #5, Los Angeles, California, 2009, chromogenic print, 39 x 49 inches

Oil Fields #18, McKittrick, California, 2003, chromogenic print, 48 x 60 inches

Breezewood, Pennsylvania, 2008, chromogenic print, 48 x 60 inches

Alberta Oil Sands #2, Fort McMurray, Alberta, 2007, chromogenic print, 48 x 60 inches

Densified Oil Filters #1, 1997, chromogenic print, 48 x 60 inches

Oxford Tire Pile #2, Westley, California, 1999, chromogenic print, 48 x 60 inches

Oxford Tire Pile #9a, Westley, California, 1999, chromogenic print, 48 x 60 inches

Oxford Tire Pile #9b, Westley, California, 1999, chromogenic print, 48 x 60 inches

SOCAR Oil Fields #6, Baku, Azerbijan, 2006, chromogenic print, 24 x 37 inches

Manufacturing #8, Textile Mill, Xiaoxing, Zhejiang, China, 2004, chromogenic print, 39 x 49 inches

VW Lot #1, Houston, Texas, 2004, chromogenic print, 48 x 60 inches

Manufacturing #16, Bird Mobile, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, China, 2005, chromogenic print, 39 x 49 inches

Urban Renewal #6, Apartment Complex, Jiangjunao, Hong Kong, China, 1999, chromogenic print, 48 x 60 inches

China Quarries #8, Xiamen, Fujian Province, China, 2004, chromogenic print, 48 x 60 inches

Railcuts #5, C.N. Track, Thompson River, British Columbia, 1985, chromogenic print, 58.75 x 73.75 inches

Bao Steel #7, Shanghai, China, 2005, chromogenic print, 48 x 60 inches

Shipyard #12, Qili Port, Zhejiang Province, China, 2005, chromogenic print, 60 x 48 inches

Shipyard #18, Qili Port, Zhejiang Province, China, 2005, chromogenic print, 49 x 39 inches

Shipbreaking #9 Diptych, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000, chromogenic print, 16 x 40 inches

Shipbreaking #11, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000, chromogenic print, 18 x 22 inches

Densified Oil Drums #4, Hamilton, Ontario, 1997, chromogenic print, 48 x 60 inches

Ferrous Bushling #18, Hamilton, Ontario, 1997, chromogenic print, 48 x 60 inches

Nickel Tailings #36, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996, chromogenic print, 40 x 60 inches

Nickel Tailings #37, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996, chromogenic print, 40 x 60 inches

Dampier Salt Ponds #1, Dampier, Western Australia, 2007, chromogenic print, 48 x 60 inches

Silver Lake Operations #15, Lake Lefroy, Western Australia, 2007, chromogenic print, 48 x 60 inches

CURRICULUM VITAE Born in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, 1955 Lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2011 Australian Minescapes, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, Australia Burtynsky: Oil, Altana Kulturstiftung, Bad Homburg, Germany Burtynsky: Oil, Ryerson Image Arts Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Burtynsky: Oil, Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Burtynsky: Oil, Fotografiska Museet, Stockholm, Sweden Burtynsky: Oil, Museum for Film and Photography, Bradford, UK 2010 Edward Burtynsky, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Hong Kong Australian Minescapes, Brisbane Powerhouse, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia Burtynsky: Oil, The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada Australian Minescapes, Sovereign Hill Gold Museum, Ballarat, Victoria, Australia 2009 Australian Minescapes, Western Australian Museum, Geraldton, Western Australia, Australia Burtynsky: Oil, Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Burtynsky: Oil, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA Australian Minescapes, Australian Centre for Photography, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Manufactured Landscapes, Museum of Science, Boston, Massachusetts, USA Edward Burtynsky: Quarries, Sidney Cooper Gallery, Christ Church University, Canterbury, UK Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Banff, Alberta, Canada Edward Burtynsky: Uneasy Beauty, Surrey Art Gallery, Surrey, British Columbia, Canada Burtynsky Australian Mines, Flowers East Gallery, London, UK 2008 Material World, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada Australian Minescapes, Western Australian Maritime Museum, Fremantle, Western Australia, Australia In Pursuit of Progress, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada 2007 Manufactured Landscapes, Gemeentemuseum Helmond, Helmond, The Netherlands China Works, Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea, San Sebastián, Spain Burtynsky Photographs (major survey exhibition), Gemeentemuseum Helmond, The Netherlands Edward Burtynsky: Photographs, Canadian Cultural Institute, Paris, France Edward Burtynsky: The China Series (touring exhibition), curated by David Brown, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art: — Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA — Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, Florida, USA — Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada — Tufts University Art Gallery, Aidekman Arts Center, Medford, Massachusetts, USA

2006

2005 2004

2003

— Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, USA — The Art Museum, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, USA — Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, USA Edward Burtynsky: China, FotoFo, Month of Photography, Palace of Art, Bratislava, Slovakia Fabryka Krajobrazu: Manufactured Landscapes, Yours Gallery, Warsaw, Poland PhotoEspana, Centro Cultural de la Villa, Madrid, Spain Manufactured Landscapes (includes 24 new China images), Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York, USA Manufactured Landscapes, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, California, USA Manufactured Landscapes, Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA Entropia, Fundacion Bilbao Bizkaia Kutxa, Bilbao, Spain Manufactured Landscapes, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Manufactured Landscapes, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada Edward Burtynsky: Mid-Career Retrospective, The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: — Finnish Museum of Photography at Cable Factory, Helsinki, Finland — The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Canada — The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York, USA — The Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, California, USA — Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA

1988 Breaking Ground—Produced by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography Exhibition tour: — Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada — Toronto Photographers Workshop, Toronto, Ontario, Canada — Floating Gallery, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada — Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Banff, Alberta, Canada SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2010 Water: National Geographic, Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles, California, USA Thanks for Being With Us: Contemporary Art from the Douglas Nielsen Collection, Tucson Museum of Art, Tuscon, Arizona, USA 2009 Vanishing Landscapes/Verschwindende Landschaften, Galerie Nikolaus Ruzicska, Salzburg, Austria In the Darkroom: Photographic Processes Before the Digital Age, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA Earth: Art of a Changing World, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK Les Visages de l’industrie, Musée des beaux-arts, Le Locle, Switzerland Una fábrica, Una Máqina Un Cuerpo, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, Mexico Nature Nation, Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem, Israel Damaged Romanticism: A Mirror of Modern Emotion, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, New York, USA Trouble in Paradise: Examining Discord Between Nature and Society, Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona, USA

Evolving Eden, Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA Prix Pictet 2008 Shortlisted Artists Exhibition, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands 2008 La Grande Image: Histoire de la Photographie Panoramique de 1839 à nos jours, Pavillon Populaire, Montpellier, France Scale Matters: Photographs from the Joseph and Charlotte Lichtenberg Collection, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, USA Modern Photographs: The Machine, the Body and the City—Gifts from the Charles Cowles Collection, Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York, USA Imaging a Shattering Earth: Contemporary Photography and the Environmental Debate: — National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada — Brunnier Art Museum, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA Moving Walls, Open Society Institute, Washington, DC, USA Eastern Standard: Western Artists in China, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, Massachusetts, USA Ingenuity, Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels, Belgium Relics and Ruins, Instituto Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and SESC Paulista, Sao Paulo, Brazil China Works, Center Koldo Mitxelena, San Sebastián, Spain International Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts, Liège, Belgium 2007 Utopian Mirage: Social Metaphors in Contemporary Photography and Film, Loeb Art Center, Poughkeepsie, New York, New York, USA A History of Photography, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK Imaging a Shattering Earth, Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada Ingenuity, Gulbekian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal

2006 C on Cities, Venice Biennale, Pavilion Padiglione Italia, Giardini della Biennale, Venice, Italy The photographic document: Aspects & Transformations, Photography Museum of Thessaloniki, Greece Made in China, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Illinois, USA Modern Times: Work, Machinery and Automation in the Arts of 1900, Palazzo Ducale, Genoa, Italy 2005 Imaging a Shattering Earth: Contemporary Photography and the Environmental Debate, Oakland University, Rochester, Minnesota, USA Disaster Topographics, Toronto Photographer’s Workshop, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Subjective Distance, McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Hot Mush and Cold North, The Ottawa Art Gallery, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada 2003 Industry and Entropy, Freedman Gallery, Albright College Center for the Arts, Reading, Pennsylvania, USA (catalogue) 2002/3 Altered Landscape: The Carol Franc Buck Collection, Norsk Museum for Fotografi-Preus Fotomuseum, Horten, Norway, and Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada, USA 2002 New Acquisitions: New Work / New Directions3 / Contemporary Selections, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, USA Altered States: Landscape Transformation in the Wake of Progress, University Art Gallery, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA Curator’s Forum: Collecting Contemporary Art, Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA 2001 Detourism, The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA

AWARDS AND HONORS 2010 Burtynsky: Oil, Kraszna-Krausz Book Award, UK 2009 Prix Pictet, London, UK, nomination and short-listed 2008 Planet in Focus Media/Industry Eco-Hero Award Canadian Environment Awards: Ideas for Life Prix Pictet, London, UK, nomination and short-listed Ideas for Life Award, Canadian Environment Awards Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts, Achievement Award ICP Infinity Award, Art category, International Center of Photography, New York, New York, USA Deutscher Fotobuch Preis, for Burtynsky: Quarries, Steidl Verlag, Göttingen, Germany 2007 Honorary Degree, Doctor of Laws, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada Honorary Degree, Doctor of Fine Arts in Photography Study, Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Honorary Degree, Doctor of Fine Arts, Montserrat College of Art, Boston, Massachusetts, USA 2006 Officer of the Order of Canada Flying Elephants Foundation Fellowship 2004 TED Prize (inaugural), Monterrey, California, USA The Rencontres d’Arles Outreach Award, Arles, France 2003 Roloff Beny Book Award, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Applied Arts magazine, Photographic Book Award Governor General of Canada Delegate, Circumpolar State Visit to Finland and Iceland Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, Academician’s Honours National Magazine Awards Foundation, Photojournalism Silver Award

SELECTED LECTURES Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, USA The Long Now Foundation, San Francisco, California, USA Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, Massachusetts, USA World Summit on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Dubai, United Arab Emirates Society for Photographic Education Conference, Denver, Colorado, USA Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Montserrat College, Boston, Massachusetts, USA Gemeentemuseum Helmond, The Netherlands Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, The Netherlands University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada National Geographic Society, Washington, DC, USA ORACLE Conference, Chicago, Illinois, USA TED Conference, Monterey, California, USA Parsons Lecture, Parsons New School for Design, New York, New York, USA International Center of Photography (ICP), New York, New York, USA Finnish Museum of Photography at Cable Factory, Helsinki, Finland Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, Québec, Canada National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Kodak Lecture Series, Ryerson Polytechnical University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, USA Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Bibliothèque National, Paris, France Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York, USA Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, Québec, Canada Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Gallery Stratford, Stratford, Ontario, Canada George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, USA Gemeentemuseum Helmonds, The Netherlands Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Alberta, Canada Grand Rapids Art Museum, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA London Museum, London, Ontario, Canada Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, USA Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie, Ontario, Canada Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, California, USA Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, USA National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, Spain San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, USA Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, USA Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York, USA Saint Louis Museum of Art, St. Louis, Missouri, USA Thessaloniki Museum of Art, Thessaloniki, Greece Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, USA Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

SELECTED CORPORATE COLLECTIONS

Ackerman & Co., Atlanta, Georgia, USA Air Canada, Montréal, Québec, Canada AstraZeneca Bank of Nova Scotia, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Beamscope Bennett Jones Beutal, Goodman, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Blackburn Group, London, Canada Blaney, McMurtry, Stappells, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Boston Red Sox, Boston, Massachusetts, USA Ciba-Geigy Canada Ltd., Toronto, Ontario, Canada CI Funds Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce/Wood Gundy Cafritz Interests, Washington, DC, USA Charles Schwab & Co. Chase Bank, New York, New York, USA Claridge Incorporated Delaney Capital Devon Petroleum, Calgary, Alberta, Canada Dow Jones, New York, New York, USA Encana Resources, Calgary, Alberta, Canada Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Fidelity Investments Foreign Affairs Canada Goldman Sachs Granite Club, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Grosvenor Capital Management, Chicago, Illinois, USA Hunt Oil Company, Calgary, Alberta, Canada INCO, Head Office, Toronto, Ontario, Canada J.P. Morgan Bank

Kelly Company, New York, New York, USA Lax, O’Sullivan, Cronk Lenczner, Slaught, Royce, Smith, Griffen, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Likrilyn Capital, Toronto, Ontario, Canada London Life, London, Ontario, Canada Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Washington, USA Morris, Rose, Ledgett, Toronto, Ontario, Canada McCarthy, Tetrault McMillan, Binch Novell, Incorporated Ontario Mining Association, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Ontario Public Service Employees Union, Toronto, Ontario, Canada The Parnassus Foundation, New York, New York, USA Phillip Morris Corporation, New York, New York, USA Power Corporation, Montréal, Québec, Canada Price Waterhouse Refco Group, Ltd. Royal Bank Schulich School of Business Sunlife of Canada Swiss Bank Swiss Re Life and Health Teleglobe Canada, Montréal, Québec, Canada Templeton Management Tory, Tory, Deslauriers & Binnington TransAlta, Corporation, Calgary, Alberta, Canada Tremblanc Capitol, New York, New York, USA

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First published in the United States of America in 2010 by Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Sundaram Tagore Galleries New York 547 West 27th Street New York, NY 10001 Tel 212 677 4520 Fax 212 677 4521 gallery@sundaramtagore.com

Beverly Hills 9606 South Santa Monica Blvd. Beverly Hills, CA 90210 Tel 310 278 4520 Fax 310 278 4525 beverlyhills@sundaramtagore.com

Hong Kong 57-59 Hollywood Road Central, Hong Kong Tel 852 2581 9678 Fax 852 2581 9673 hongkong@sundaramtagore.com

www.sundaramtagore.com President and curator: Sundaram Tagore Director, New York: Susan McCaffrey Director, Hong Kong: Faina Goldstein Designer: Russell Whitehead Art consultation, associate editor: Marcus Schubert Printer: CA Design, Hong Kong

Art consultants: Diana d’Arenberg Joseph Lawrence Benjamin Rosenblatt Alison Ward

Printed on FSC-certified paper made of 50 percent post-consumer waste. Photographs © 2010 Edward Burtynsky Text © 2010 Francis Hodgson All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover: Nickel Tailings #37, Sudbury, Ontario, detail, 1996, chromogenic print, 40 x 60 inches