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. In vivid detail and lush color, Burtynsky documents the effects of manufacturing and consumption on the earth: monstrous quarries, poisonous metal tailings, and sprawling oil fields. His works are sobering meditations on the scale and impact of human industry. Burtynsky says, “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.”
Burtynsky has devoted 30 years to photographing some of the world’s largest industrial operations. His vast repertoire includes the mining, quarrying, ship-breaking, oil, rail, and recycling industries. In the Oxford Tire Pile series, for instance, Burtynsky explores a canyon of 40 million cast-off tires in California. Meanwhile, his Bao Steel series uncovers a surreal landscape of coal piles on the banks of the Yangtze River, Shanghai. Venturing inside these mammoth sites, Burtynsky gives us access to places that lie outside our everyday reality but provide the commodities that sustain our day-to-day existence.
Using a large-format viewfinder camera, with 4- by-5 inch and 8-by-10 inch film, Burtynsky creates remarkably lucid images. His prints immerse viewers in vibrant landscapes with a rich concentration of detail. Through a careful understanding of light and optics, he composes somewhat flattened spaces where each element within the frame is given equal weight. The effect can be slightly disorienting and the scale of the landscapes ambiguous. However, once you step closer and identify a recognizable detail—such as a tree or a person—you instantly reconstruct your understanding of the space. For Burtynsky these small details are essential as they lure us inside the image and allow us to imagine ourselves within the environment.
Before shooting, Burtynsky carries out thorough research on his locations. He reads extensively, studying everything from novels to government reports. Once he arrives, he works at dawn and dusk, which he describes as “the shoulder times.” Often, he shoots on overcast days. Relying on his surroundings, Burtynsky uses natural “scaffolding” to position his tripod at high vantage points. When working on his India series, he mounted his camera atop a 50-foot pole and worked remotely from a computer on ground level. Recently, while shooting his Australia series, Burtynsky began photographing with a digital camera from a helicopter. What results from such heights are compelling, vertiginous compositions with a monumental effect.
Burtynsky began photographing nature in the early 1980s. His early works were intimate explorations of Canada’s unspoiled landscapes. By the late 1980s, however, he turned away from the quickly disappearing natural terrain. He realized this was the world that we were losing not the one we were to inherit. Instead, he reflected on his own experience working in the mining and automobile industries. Gradually he began to investigate industrial incursions into land with arresting results.
Edward Burtynsky’s works are in the collections of more than fifty museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Burtynsky was recognized with a TED award in 2005. The following year he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honor. In 2007, Burtynsky was the subject of the award-wining documentary Manufactured Landscapes screened at the Sundance Film Festival. He holds three honorary doctorate degrees and his distinctions include the Outreach Award at the Rencontres d’Arles and the Applied Arts Magazine book award. Burtynsky lives and works in Toronto, Canada.
For more information please email hongkong@sundaramtagore.com or call 2581 9678.
"Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky's first solo exhibition in Hong Kong offers works made between 1985 and 2008. His longtime preoccupation with the effect that industrial operations have on the earth is apparent: The large-sale photographs show how various industries currently dominate landscapes around the world, from oil fields to highways, electronics factories to car lots."
"After following the construction of the Three Gorges Dam [documented in the film Manufactured Landscapes], I'm now doing a series on dams further up the Yangtze as part of a series on water. The kind of meditation I did on oil [in a book published in 2008], I'm doing on water. I see them both as having huge human implications."
"If aliens wanted to understand modern civilization as it is today, they would probably look at Ed Burtynsky's photographs. His large-scale works show monstrous quarries, poisonous metal tailings, spaghetti highways and sprawling oil fields."
"Famous for his panoramic color photographs of natural landscapes that teem with mining, industrial and building activity, Edward Burtynsky is finally getting a one-man show in Asia."
"Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is famous for his visually striking and disarmingly beautiful large-format photographs of industrial landscapes. During his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, he talks to Penny Zhou about his industrial background and the messages behind his images."
"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."
"Back in 1984 when the HSBC tower was first being built, planes still landed in Kai Tak Airport and the jetfoil ride to Macau was considered a long trip, photographer Edward Burtynsky arrived Hong Kong. It was the first place in Asia the Canadian had traveled to. We caught up with Burtynsky before he jetted off to Fuijian province, and chatted about being detained by Chinese police, getting access to Saudi Arabian oil fields and that first trip to Asia"
"Vast. Intricate. Awe-inspiring. Depressing. Momentous. Stagnant. These conflicting words come to mind when gazing on the universally acclaimed works of Edward Burtynsky. The Canadian photographer is best known for capturing a global panoply of images featuring breathtaking scenes with a man-and-environment theme"
"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."
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.
"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."
"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"
