Edward Burtynsky
St. Catharines native Edward Burtynsky has developed an international following for his photographs of industrial landscapes. Environmentalists have lauded his work as illustrations of the brutality of human enterprise on the planet. Ed Burtynsky grew up in St. Catharines, Ontario where his father, who worked at the local GM plant, taught him how to take pictures and develop film. Burtynsky graduated with a BA in Photography from Ryerson and became a landscape photographer after he stumbled upon on an old coal mine in Pennsylvania and was struck by the beauty of white birch saplings growing on a landscape of barren rock and slag. From photographing mines, Burtynsky then began photographing oil fields and other industrial sites, travelling around the world, from China to Bangladesh to Australia. His photographs of industrial landscapes are included in the collections of over fifty major museums around the world, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Bibliotèque Nationale in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Most recently, his photographs of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico appeared on the front page of the Globe and Mail. Ken Rockburn spoke to Edward Burtynsky at his studio in Toronto.
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