Edward Burtynsky's photographs are a document of our modern world. From oil-scarred landscapes and the dream like monotony of manufacturing plants, to the booming industrial backdrop of modern China, his work represents the stark and very real repercussions of our modern way of life. But despite the socio-political nature of his subjects, Burtynsky maintains that he is 'not an activist', he is, at the core, an artist.
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"Every viewer will see in Burtynsky's work the aspects of nature, and of man's engagement in nature, that seem most significant to him at the time. It may be the beauty of color; it may be the magic of pattern; it may be the bizarre juxtaposition of beauty and industry, or the betrayal of nature or of man that often results from uncontrolled industrial exploitation. Burtynsky's work can generate this diversity of appreciation due to its accessibility, its universality, and its honesty. The artificial is made natural, and man's attack on nature is made beautifully clear."
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"As an industrial designer, the profession presents me with an intrinsic irony.
It celebrates the possibilities of producing beautiful things. But it also exposes the disarming reality of where things come from."
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"Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is internationally known for his works on man- made landscapes that render, with disconcerting beauty, grave matters of industrial transformation. For its photography focussed issue, The Hong Kong Gallery Guide caught up with Burtynsky ahead of his exhibition at Sundaram Tagore Gallery, to hear his views on photography as an art form, collecting art, and his creative vision."
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World-renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky, known for his disarmingly beautiful images of industrial landscapes, is to have his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. The Canadian artist presents large-scale photographs shot in Hong Kong, China, India, Azerbaijan, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, and the United States.
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"From the mid-1980s to the present, photographer Edward Burtynsky has made beautiful images of landscapes we'd rather not see. He photographs sites that are essential to our worldwide energy consumption: open-pit mines, refineries, quarries, and uranium tailings. More recently, he has photographed landscapes we couldn't imagine without his camera: China's relocation of millions of citizens to make way for the Three Gorges Dam, E-waste recycling, tire dumps, and ship- breaking. For two decades, Burtynsky's environmentally conscious photographs have grown from picturing quiet, seemingly benign hillsides with houses and dogs to the flagrantly poisonous, in the red river tailings of Sudbury, Ontario."
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"On his way to document the Gulf spill, the Canadian photographer talks to Edmund Lee about his fascination with the imageries of urban and industrial transformation. It is with the industrial landscapes created by mankind that one can best judge its progress and failings, and Edward Burtynsky has been taking a front row seat in these spectacles of environmental disasters for nearly three decades. The 55-year-old Canadian artist's large-format colour photographs have drawn worldwide acclaim for the sublime beauty they captured."
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"Over the last three decades, Edward Burtynsky has created a body of images he describes as tracing "the man-made transformations our civilisation has imposed upon nature". This is a modest formulation with which to describe landscape photographs of often vast scale and stunning ocular power. Burtynsky's camera surveys terrain apparently subject to Promethean forces: quarries sit like mammoth inverted buildings, gouged out according to an unnatural symmetry. A mine tailing spreads luminous poison across blackened countryside, a suppurating geological sore. Oil derricks stretch like advancing robots as far as any human eye can see."
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"Edward Burtynsky wants to start a conversation about change. His photography documents the massive impact of human beings on the earth's landscape. He has filled his view finder with nickel mines in Sundbury, marble quarries in Italy and the demolition of the Yangtze River vallery in China. The enormous, deeply colorful prints he produces are both sublime and horrible."
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"Edward Burtynsky views the world through a large-format camera and finds beauty in highly improbable places. For nearly 20 years his subject has been the ravages of heavy industry, seen at a scale so vast as to be unimaginable."
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"Edward Burtynsky's grandly scaled photographs of industrial wastelands and detritus radiate a beauty as fearsome as it is spectacular. His recent retrospective confronted viewers with the true (but not quite hidden) cost of fulfilling our consumerist desires"
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"He has photographed slag heaps in Sundbury, marble quaries in Italy and disintegrating cities along the Yangtze. How a miner turned entrepreneur conjures beauty from devastation, changing the way we see the world"
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"As a recipient of the TED prize, Burtynsky received his wishes, becoming a founding member of an exclusive club that includes the likes of Bono and Bill Clinton. Make no mistake, however; this is not a prize to be wasted on the self indulgent. Upon acceptance, the winner is charged with saving the world of its ills, armed only with their reputation, a sharp mind and a purse of $100,000."
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"Uncomfortable ironies abound in Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky's large color photographs of ravaged natural terrain. Burtynsky's subjects have consistently been landscapes in which the process of industrialization has resulted in spectacles that dwarf the likes of Michael Heizer's sprawling City, 1970-99. Burtynsky's work is undeniably gorgeous yet maintains connections to the documentary"
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