Edward Burtynsky looks back at four decades of photography in talk at Concordia

The famed photographer stopped by the Hall building as a guest for the Wild Talks Lecture Series.
Edward Burtynsky and Zoë Tousignant at the Wild Talks Lecture. Photo by Iris Ducournau / The Concordian

On the evening of Jan. 22, the Hall building was abuzz with activity. Outside the auditorium, a line snaked from one end of the room to the other. Everyone was there for one purpose: to listen to Edward Burtynsky speak about his work.

The landscape photographer sat down in conversation with Zoë Tousignant, the curator of photography at the McCord Stewart Museum. He was this year’s guest for the Wild Talks Lecture Series, an annual event hosted in honour of Catherine Wild, the former dean of Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts. 

Burtynsky originally hails from St. Catharines, Ontario, where he began taking pictures at age 12. Since then, he’s grown from “the kid with the camera” to a world-renowned photographer riding helicopters to capture breathtaking shots of the Earth, or more accurately, of the scars we’ve left upon it.

He specializes in large-scale industrial landscapes. More specifically, he photographs sites like mining plants and landfills, and he often does so from above. 

“For me, I’m always trying to show scale,” he said. “There’s something more compelling about photographing man-altered landscapes. A transformed landscape is the world unfolding in front of us.”

But the industrial sector isn’t always the main focus — in fact, the core of his interest lies in nature. He has always strived to look “deep into geological time,” as he puts it. 

At one point, he displayed his pictures of glaciers in the Coast Mountains, British Columbia. The image showed greyish ice that seemed to flow down the rock face it sat on, a patchwork of white snow covering it. 

He explained that they were the last glaciers at this altitude and latitude in Canada. The ice is estimated to be over 170,000 years old and is rapidly shrinking. 

“As it’s melting away, the rock [underneath] will see the sun for the first time in 170,000 years,” he said. 

With these photos, he warns us about humanity’s impact on the environment. 

Burtynsky’s passion for photography is shown less through overt emotion and more through the careful thought he put into his projects. He spoke extensively on his efforts to make his art viewable in a physical space. 

“I want there to be a reason for the viewer to come,” he said.

When gazing up at his pictures, some can hardly believe their eyes. 

“I’ve had people standing in front of these prints tell me, ‘It’s not a photograph.’” He shook his head and added, “No, I took it, it’s a photo,” to a gale of audience laughter.

Ultimately, Burtynsky’s goal is to make a viewer ask questions rather than simply marvel at how beautiful his work is. He believes that the isolation of the ordinary turns it into the extraordinary. Each photo invokes a sense of wonder, from the forested North American wetlands to the men sitting among endless piles of plastic bottles. 

For someone so concerned with capturing images that are larger than life, his work feels incredibly human.

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