Edward Burtynsky - Ciel variable Magazine

The largest Burtynsky collection takes shape

Web Posts: News
Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Edward Burtynsky

[November 24, 2020] After forty years recording the twisted relationships between humans and nature, Edward Burtynsky is thinking about his posterity. The former student at Ryerson University, in Toronto, is promising a huge donation to the university’s museum. The Ryerson Image Centre will therefore house the largest Burtynsky collection. The donation will be made as […]

Anthropocene Fatigue: Edward Burtynsky’s Strategy of Collapse — Bénédicte Ramade

Ciel variable 112 - COLLECTIONS REVISITED | Essays
Authors: Bénédicte Ramade | Artists: Edward Burtynsky

[Summer 2019] By Bénédicte Ramade [Excerpt] From the start it seems taken for granted: Edward Burtynsky’s Anthropocene at the National Gallery of Canada will be technophilic.1 At every opportunity. Even as stratigraphers are still discussing the contours of this geological epoch attributed to human activity, still bitterly arguing over the relevance of the very word […]

Edward Burtynsky, Oil – Sylvain Campeau, Between the Perceptible and the Ethical

Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Edward Burtynsky

August 28, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — The images are supreme. Of rather respectable dimensions – when they are not downright immense – and brightly coloured, they please us, dazzle us, force us to admire them. They show landscapes, openings into our immediate environment. But this environment does not have the bucolic accents of yore, for it is increasingly occupied by signs of exploitation of natural resources. Its wild – truly wild – territories are rarer and rarer…

Our world

Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD
Artists: Edward Burtynsky, Jacky Georges Lafargue, Louis Couturier, Nadia Seboussi, Tendance Floue

From Alberta to Azerbaijan, from Resolute Bay to Mumbai, and from Oran to Johannesburg,this issue reveals images of an industrious, prosperous world that includes numerous dysfunctions and aberrations. With aesthetic strategies combining the documentary and the sublime, a multitude of perspectives, narrations, and installations, the image sometimes retreats to the background. EDWARD BURTYNSKY Oil A […]

That Which the Image Bespeaks – Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Edward Burtynsky, Jacky Georges Lafargue, Louis Couturier

From Alberta to Azerbaijan, from Resolute Bay to Mumbai, via Oran, Johannesburg, Chittagong, Shanghai, and Tucson, this issue presents images of an industrious, prosperous world that has its (un)fair share of dysfunctions and aberrations. In all of these images, the documentary component, embodied within very different aesthetic strategies, attests to and interprets various facets of […]

Edward Burtynsky, Oil & Water – John K. Grande

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Interviews
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: Edward Burtynsky

June 2, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — Edward Burtynsky […] has captured iconic images of human intervention in the landscape in works of a scope and scale that evidence how the activities and the layerings of nature and culture change a place. His recent books include China, Quarries, and Oil…

Montreal Collects, Contemporary Photography: The LaRochelle and Taillefer collections – James Campbell

Ciel variable 78 - COLLECTING PHOTOGRAPHY | Essays
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Carlos & Jason Sanchez, Edward Burtynsky, Geoffrey James, Janita Eyre, Loretta Lux, Louis Joncas, Marion Landry, Matthieu Brouillard, Mitch Epstein, Nan Goldin, Pablo Ferrer, Pablo Zutela Zahr, Pascal Grandmaison, Richard Misrach, Roberto Pellegrinuzzi, Rodney Graham, Sarah Morris, Scott McFarland, Stephanie Schneider, William Christenberry

[Spring 2008] by James Campbell Interest in contemporary photography has reached a fever pitch. In 2006, at Sotheby’s in New York, a huge colour print by Andreas Gursky (dating from 1999) went on the block and sold for $2,256,000. Six months earlier, Richard Prince’s seminal work Untitled (Cowboy), a 1989 Ektacolor print of the Marlboro man, […]

Lazare, Portraits et paysages, la collection Lazare – René Viau, Singular Introspections

Ciel variable 78 - COLLECTING PHOTOGRAPHY | Portfolios
Authors: René Viau | Artists: Angela Grauerholz, Carlos & Jason Sanchez, Chuck Close, Edward Burtynsky, Julia Margaret Cameron, Michal Rovner, Nan Goldin, Pablo Picasso, Paul Strand, Raymonde April, Sally Mann, Sarah Moon

[Spring 2008] Following a first purchase, a work by Julia Margaret Cameron (United Kingdom, nineteenth century), the Lazare family has moulded the photographic content of it’s collection over the past twenty-five years to form what is a mainly contemporary ensemble of emotionally rich portraits and nostalgic landscapes. Whether it is a poetic photograph of the […]

Edward Burtynsky – Bruno Chalifour, L’oeil d’un coloriste sur le sublime contemporain

Ciel variable 72 - PHOTO PERFORMANCE | Essays
Authors: Bruno Chalifour | Artists: Edward Burtynsky

[Summer 2006] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract This article addresses the new work by Edward Burtynsky as it was presented, in part, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In this exhibition, twenty-four images on contemporary China were […]

Edward Burtynsky, Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky – Johanna Mizgala

Ciel variable 61 - MODERNE | VERNACULAIRE | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Johanna Mizgala | Artists: Edward Burtynsky

[Summer 2003] National Gallery of Canada 31 January–4 May 2003 The photograph – the colour photograph in particular – seems to have taken on gigantic proportions. Monumental images are a consequence of technological advances, but, more importantly, the shifting proportions are born from the work’s relationship to its place of reception: the gallery. Scale provokes […]