Hall Art Foundation
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Edward Burtynsky
24. November 2012 - 1. Dezember 2013

Edward Burtynsky (b. 1955) is a Canadian photographer who has achieved international recognition for his large-format color photographs of global industrial landscapes. Burtynsky's most famous photographs are sweeping landscape views where modern industrial activity has reshaped the surface of the land. His imagery combines the raw elements of mining, quarrying, manufacturing, shipping, oil production, and recycling into exquisitely detailed, exactingly rendered, and unexpectedly sublime landscapes. In a series initiated in the early 1990s, Burtynsky has photographed active and abandoned stone quarries in Vermont, Italy, India, China and Iberia. Rock of Ages #59 (1991) shows an overhead view of the abandoned granite quarry in Barre, Vermont. Given its form through a process of extraction, this abandoned quarry is now a monumental void filled with turquoise water. Burtynsky has described these Vermont quarries as “inverted skyscrapers” or “residual landscapes.” Burtynsky’s “Tailing” series from 1995-96 document slurries of nickel production waste from mining operations in Sudbury, Ontario. In Nickel Tailings #31 (1996), a river of vivid, blood-orange slurry cuts through the rural landscape. Burtynsky renders this tailing as an abstract and dramatic composition, while documenting its environmental impact as an ecological wound.