Uploaded March 2016 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
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Edward Burtnsky is a 2016 winner of the Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts.
Directed by Simon Brothers
Co-production / Coproduction : Canada Council for the Arts / Conseil des arts du Canada & Powerline Films
Presentation of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Independent Media Arts Alliance
The Canada Council for the Arts is a federal, arm's-length Crown corporation created by an Act of Parliament in 1957 (Canada Council for the Arts Act) "to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts."
For more information, visit: ggavma.canadacouncil.ca
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Transcript:
There’s this whole other world that we never get to see, but we’re participating with it all the time. I’m saying: it’s there, it exists, and I want to photograph it.
Peter Herrndorf, President & CEO, National Arts Centre: This is an artist and a time that have come together in a very powerful way. He is the artist that personifies the environmental issue more than anyone I know in the world.
When I was 11, my dad and I saw an ad in a newspaper that there was a widower who was selling her darkroom. She said you can have everything in it – the contents – for $25. So all of a sudden I had my own camera, with a bulk loader with hundreds of feet of Tri-X. So it’s kind of like today, if you give a kid an iPhone you don’t really care if they shoot a hundred pictures, you can just delete. Well, back then, if you had the family camera, you couldn’t just go and shoot the legs and floor of your kitchen table or something, because they’d say: Stop wasting film. I had the chance to go out and shoot more and more frames of it. Then it emerges in the tray of developer under this orange light and it was like magic. I was hooked.
I can take 20 images and there’s always going to be one that’s more interesting. My early, early recollections of some of the favourite things that I enjoyed being Canadian were going out into the landscape. So I began to think about the landscape and how we change that landscape. And being a resource-based country, there was all kinds of examples. So I’d drive out of Toronto into Sudbury and start looking at the tailings and the mines and trying to capture that on film. I was using colour and large format – and at that time colour was largely seen as a commercial medium. If you wanted to be a serious artist back then you had to work in black-and-white.
This is something we’re engaged with, we can’t have these cities, we can’t have this lifestyle without incursion into the landscape to get the materials. I’m just showing the scale industry and it has multiple meanings. One can look at it as an environmental disaster. One can look at it as human progress. One can look at it from the point of view of artistic merit and whether it captures the imagination and a sense of wonder.
I think if you look at the whole body of work, there is a story of the tilting of the balance that we’ve now become almost too successful. We’ve got our boot on the neck of nature and we’re not letting up. That story has kind of emerged in the last 10-15 years as we recognize global change of climate, and as we realize resource extraction, as we notice the oceans being depleted of fish… All these things are now coalescing to point to the fact that 7 billion human beings on the planet is having a consequence.
These are still little, little snippets of a big big thing. China was like that too. There’s no way you can comprehend the scale of China but you can kind of make a feeble attempt with a frame, you know?
There’s an urgency that I have now that wasn’t as present - I was still taken by wonder of the scale at the very beginning and looking at the largest examples. But that wonder has turned to concern. How are we going to stop being who we are?
Please subscribe to support the arts in Canada.
Edward Burtnsky is a 2016 winner of the Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts.
Directed by Simon Brothers
Co-production / Coproduction : Canada Council for the Arts / Conseil des arts du Canada & Powerline Films
Presentation of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Independent Media Arts Alliance
The Canada Council for the Arts is a federal, arm's-length Crown corporation created by an Act of Parliament in 1957 (Canada Council for the Arts Act) "to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts."
For more information, visit: ggavma.canadacouncil.ca
****
Transcript:
There’s this whole other world that we never get to see, but we’re participating with it all the time. I’m saying: it’s there, it exists, and I want to photograph it.
Peter Herrndorf, President & CEO, National Arts Centre: This is an artist and a time that have come together in a very powerful way. He is the artist that personifies the environmental issue more than anyone I know in the world.
When I was 11, my dad and I saw an ad in a newspaper that there was a widower who was selling her darkroom. She said you can have everything in it – the contents – for $25. So all of a sudden I had my own camera, with a bulk loader with hundreds of feet of Tri-X. So it’s kind of like today, if you give a kid an iPhone you don’t really care if they shoot a hundred pictures, you can just delete. Well, back then, if you had the family camera, you couldn’t just go and shoot the legs and floor of your kitchen table or something, because they’d say: Stop wasting film. I had the chance to go out and shoot more and more frames of it. Then it emerges in the tray of developer under this orange light and it was like magic. I was hooked.
I can take 20 images and there’s always going to be one that’s more interesting. My early, early recollections of some of the favourite things that I enjoyed being Canadian were going out into the landscape. So I began to think about the landscape and how we change that landscape. And being a resource-based country, there was all kinds of examples. So I’d drive out of Toronto into Sudbury and start looking at the tailings and the mines and trying to capture that on film. I was using colour and large format – and at that time colour was largely seen as a commercial medium. If you wanted to be a serious artist back then you had to work in black-and-white.
This is something we’re engaged with, we can’t have these cities, we can’t have this lifestyle without incursion into the landscape to get the materials. I’m just showing the scale industry and it has multiple meanings. One can look at it as an environmental disaster. One can look at it as human progress. One can look at it from the point of view of artistic merit and whether it captures the imagination and a sense of wonder.
I think if you look at the whole body of work, there is a story of the tilting of the balance that we’ve now become almost too successful. We’ve got our boot on the neck of nature and we’re not letting up. That story has kind of emerged in the last 10-15 years as we recognize global change of climate, and as we realize resource extraction, as we notice the oceans being depleted of fish… All these things are now coalescing to point to the fact that 7 billion human beings on the planet is having a consequence.
These are still little, little snippets of a big big thing. China was like that too. There’s no way you can comprehend the scale of China but you can kind of make a feeble attempt with a frame, you know?
There’s an urgency that I have now that wasn’t as present - I was still taken by wonder of the scale at the very beginning and looking at the largest examples. But that wonder has turned to concern. How are we going to stop being who we are?
