The large-scale photographs of Edward Burtynsky (b.1955) have made him one of the world’s most acclaimed photographers. Technically meticulous and compositionally hypnotic, his works transform sites of industry and environmental upheaval into images of haunting beauty and moral complexity, evoking both awe and unease. They expose the paradox of progress: our capacity to shape nature and the consequences of doing so.
In Edward Burtynsky: Life & Work, author Marc Mayer expertly takes readers through the artist’s remarkable career from his youth in St. Catharines, Ontario—growing up in the home of Ukrainian parents—to his training at Ryerson Polytechnic Institute (now Toronto Metropolitan University), where he developed an art form that fuses the precision of documentary with aesthetic grandeur. The book situates Burtynsky within the lineage of landscape art while charting his evolution toward international multimedia projects that encompass film, installation, and augmented reality. Through early bodies of work including Railcuts, 1985, and Tailings, 1995–96, to later projects like Water, 2011–12, and Anthropocene, 2015–16, Burtynsky’s career has redefined photographic seeing, making visible the networks of extraction, consumption, and waste that bind our modern existence.
“The tension between attraction and repulsion is Edward Burtynsky’s signature. His grand, seductive images of environmental disturbance form a scalable metaphor for the human condition: we know our dependence on industry imperils us, yet beauty keeps us looking.”
Marc Mayer
Internationally celebrated, works by Burtynsky are held in the collections of more than sixty major museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tate Modern, London, and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Burtynsky is an Officer of the Order of Canada, a recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, and the founder of the Scotiabank Photography Award.
About the Author
Marc Mayer is a distinguished Canadian curator, writer, and art historian and a Member of the Order of Canada. His career spans leadership roles at major national institutions, including the National Gallery of Canada (2008–19) and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2004–8). He has also held management and curatorial positions at the Brooklyn Museum and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. Renowned for his insight into both contemporary and historical art, Mayer has curated landmark exhibitions and authored numerous catalogues and essays on significant artists in Canada and abroad. His writing and leadership continue to shape public understanding of art’s place in cultural life.