♪ >> Hello.

I'm Jim Deeks.

Welcome to this edition of Canada Files .

We Canadians are very proud of many artists who have become famous in our country.

But outside our borders there aren't many who have become internationally renowned, despite the brilliance of their work.

One artist who has achieved worldwide fame is our guest on this episode.

His name is Edward Burtynsky.

As you'll see, his incredible talent comes from the art of photography through which he's teaching all of us about the effect we're having on our planet.

Before we start, I want to give you a taste of what Burtynsky's art and passion involve.

Landscapes... but also evidence of the impact and destruction of mankind.

Mountains of garbage.

Massive oil fields.

Rusted manufacturing plants.

Deep rock quarries.

From a distance, they look like brilliant and compelling abstract art.

Until you get up close and see what Ed's eye and his camera see.

It's just stunning work!

>> Edward Burtynsky.

Welcome.

You are in your studio in Toronto and we are in our studio around the corner from you.

We are separated because of pandemic precautions.

Talking about the pandemic, for someone who has spent the better part of the last 40 years travelling to all four corners of the earth in search of unique scenes to photograph.

The last several months of pandemic travel restrictions must have been driving you crazy.

>> Jim, I'd like to say it has but it hasn't actually.

Because I've travelled so much-- maybe half of my year is on a jet or in some foreign country dealing with all the issues of access, etc.

Having this last year forcing me to be at home has been a welcome respite.

It's also forced me to get back to basics.

Just me, the camera.

Going for walks.

Trucking up north-- driving around, seeing what I can see.

Producing a body of work that way was refreshing.

Just me, the camera and time.

>> Let's go back to basics.

Let's talk about how you became what you are today.

You were born in St. Catherines, Ontario which is just across Lake Ontario from Toronto where we are now.

In the mid-1950s, St Catherines was a very nice town but I'm not sure anybody would describe it as a hotbed of artistic photography.

What got the bug in you?

What created the spark of interest in photography?

>> I grew up in a creative household.

My father was displaced by the war and came to Canada in the early 50s after the war.

He had a passion for art, painting, photography.

I got that bug from him.

But he also had a real passion for the outdoors.

He loved going fishing, going into the forest looking for mushrooms which I did with him in the fall.

So I got a lot of the outdoors with him.

And I got the art bug with him.

He died when I was quite young.

I was 15 when he passed away.

But I carried on and got my first camera when I was 11.

With that camera, I was able to go around with a 100 foot roll of film.

I had a couple of those spools and I was able to peel off 36 exposures in the old roll of 36 and put it in a camera of black and white.

I'd come home at the end of the day and process the film.

To me, the magic was that evening.

I'd put one of those negatives in an enlarger-- blow it up to an 8 by 10.

Just watching it appear in that orange glow of a darkroom and then fixing it.

The excitement of being able to make an image of a world that I was just walking around in.

Now it's this two-dimensional representation of that place.

I used to paint before that.

I thought this was so much quicker than painting.

It's so much more fun.

I can hang out with my friends and still make art.

It was always there St. Catherines wasn't the place where one launches their career as an international photographic artist.

But I did have some teachers in college who said, "Hey, you have a real aptitude for making pictures.

Every assignment we give you you come back with something really extraordinary.

You should go to Ryerson."

That's when I crossed Lake Ontario, went to Toronto.

In 1976, I started my education in photography and did a Bachelor of Arts in Photography at Ryerson.

>> Did you always see photography as an art form?

Or was your initial thinking that this is a way I can make a living?

>> I always wanted it as an art form.

I did make money with it.

In early days, I photographed weddings for friends for a few bucks.

I worked as a magazine photographer for awhile.

I worked at IBM as a photographer for awhile.

So I did all kinds of things to put myself through.

But I never wanted to have my camera for hire.

I always wanted to have the camera as a tool for my creative outlet, to be able to explore the worlds.

As photographers and artists, we're always trying to look at reality and find the moment where it transcends that.

There's something that you can't put your finger on but when we stand in front of that image, it makes us feel we are transported somewhere else.

It invokes our sense of wonder.

As an artist, I'm always in search of that moment when the banal becomes extraordinary.

>> When did you discover the idea that you could blend environmental subjects with photographic expression?

That more than anything-- the environment has been your trademark as a photographer.

>> It couldn't have happened if there wasn't that love of nature to begin with.

I had to really engage.

Be in the forest.

Understand it.

Go fishing or camping.

As soon as I got my licence to drive at 16-- the first thing I did was buy a canoe.

My friend had a car and we went up north to camp.

It's that understanding of that place where in a way, we get to see what Nature intended for the planet.

I wanted to say something about that.

I kept photographing that pristine landscape.

After awhile I kept thinking, "If I want to be a contemporary of my time, this felt too nostalgic for me."

This felt like a yearning for this untramelled world that was there.

This notion of a paradise lost and I'm trying to re-find it.

I had an opportunity as I put myself through school.

I was able to get jobs at GM and in the mining companies up in the north that paid really well.

It was looking at those places that eventually I thought maybe it's not going to the pristine landscape that is true to my time.

It's going to the place where we transform that landscape.

What I'm witnessing at that time, even in the early 80s the projections for human population growth were spiking.

It was unprecedented.

So we were in this unprecedented moment where the human populations were going to be on this exponential curve.

I was looking at resources and thinking, "As we become more on this planet, we're going to be using more iron ore, copper, and trees."

We live on a finite planet.

So even in the early 80s, I realized that locking onto that idea and continually trying to find a new way to express that idea, that eventually the compendium of work that would grow out of that would somehow be a portrait of how we as a species using technology, have transformed the planet.

If I was trying to tell an intelligent species on another planet what we're up to, I would say we've discovered technology.

We have developed consciousness.

Now we are using our technology to extract all the necessary things to build our metropolitan cities.

To live the lives and transport us around the way we do today.

That would be the big thing that I would want to tell another intelligent species about what we're up to here on the planet.

>> You've also shown us still on the earth that we are desecrating the planet to a great degree.

I'm sure this is a question you get asked every time you step out the door in the morning by somebody.

How do you find the photographs and locations that you do.

In the forty years since the early 80s that you mentionned, you've have gone to almost every corner of the earth.

You've been to some of the remotest places on the planet.

How do you find these places?

I assume you don't wake up in the morning and say, "I think I'll go to Nigeria today and see what I can shoot."

>> Very true but it's certainly gotten a lot easier with the worldwide web and the internet and Google Earth and all that.

Before that, it was hard.

One of my early subjects was quarries.

How do I find the big quarries in the world?

I went to the Toronto Reference Library and I looked up magazines for people in the quarry business.

They had quarry conferences.

I'd look at the magazines and find people who sold equipment to people who ran quarries.

So it was a whole other way of going to the stacks, looking at cards, finding magazines and taking notes.

Then calling them long distance and paying for it.

Eventually finding my way to Vermont.

There I'd have to talk my way into the quarry.

So it was a very different way of working pre-internet than post-internet.

With post-internet I can research.

For me, it was how do you go from a general idea like quarries or copper mines to the specific place in the world.

One thing I kept doing to define that-- I looked for quarries or mines that had been around for a long time that were still very productive and going.

And that they were the largest examples of mining or quarrying.

If I thought of copper mines, there are probably 25,000 copper mines around the world.

Well, which one and why?

Which is the biggest copper mine in the world?

I would go there and if they didn't let me in I'd go to the second biggest copper mine in the world and try and get into there.

I'd work my way down.

Usually the first or second mine would say, "Come over.

Let's see what you can do."

>> When you find a location is there something that you can see in the shot that the rest of us mortals can't see?

How do you pick the place that you want to snap that photo?

>> That's a great question and very rarely asked.

There is something and I'm always reminded of it.

To get to that place, you really have to understand the present moment.

You have to be in that moment.

You have to look at all the elements that are at work.

The light, texture, colour, time of year.

I remember I had an assistant with me on a shoot early on.

I was shooting 8 by 10s-- very large negatives.

So it was a big commitment at that time.

Even in the 80s, it was $10 for a sheet of film.

$10 to process that film and $10 to make a contact sheet.

When you click...money in the 1980s was hard to come by, ...you really commit.

When you make a picture, it's a big commitment.

I remember sitting there for an hour, slowly finding on this big glass plate waiting for that moment.

At one point, the person with me said, "What are you looking at?"

They were watching me at work.

I found a rock and I moved it over.

They got up, looked and said, "I had no idea that was there!"

It is the ability to isolate within that landscape a moment where something occurs.

You have to attenuate your eye, your mind and all your senses especially your visual sense to say, "By isolating this, this here is the picture.

Everything else becomes mundane."

I learned that the photograph of the places I go to are almost inevitably more interesting than the place itself.

When you're walking around a quarry, it just looks like a torn-up landscape.

All of a sudden, there's a small spot where if I isolate that, some magic occurs.

Again looking for that transcendent moment where the mundane becomes the extraordinary.

I wonder with all the destruction, garbage and poverty that you've seen over the last forty years, how has that affected you personally or emotionally?

>> When I was doing a lot of that work and particularly when I went into places like India or China-- India, in particular.

To see the kind of scant means of existence.

At the time that I was shooting, I had daughters, aged 2 and 5.

I actually found myself in tears at times, just thinking about these children and the incredible disadvantage they had in making a living.

Begging for an existence.

You see things that you know would never ever happen here.

Yet that kind of resilience-- that human resilience.

And what normal could be.

One of the things I saw and learned about humans is we are incredibly adaptable.

We can adapt to a new normal faster than any other creature on the planet.

When I looked at that normal , I realized how far it was from my normal.

At the same time, there were moments when I was in India.

It got so hot in midday, we would sit in the square near this quarry town.

I saw the sheer joy of the people there.

They were all suffering in a way, the same diseases.

No-one made more than $2 a day.

They worked hard for it.

But there was a camaraderie-- the girls laughing going to get the water.

We were at a central part of town with a water well.

I turned to my assistants and said, "I see more joy here, than there ever could be at the corner of Spadina and King in downtown Toronto."

They're all part of a community.

They work and share as a community.

>> Is what you do with a camera still fairly unique or is there an Edward Burtynsky school of photography coming behind you?

Where there are younger photographers emulating what you do.

>> I do see that there is.

When I was doing this 40 years ago, there weren't a lot of people thinking of doing a project photographing how we're transforming the planet.

But I do think now there's an urgency.

We see that climate change is not going away.

It's a problem that's only going to increase.

We're looking at resource extraction and the decrease of biodiversity.

I think the youth, the younger artists and photographers want to say something about that.

Want to take that on as a subject.

I'm not saying I'm the first pioneer.

Carleton Watkins was photographing mines back in the late 1800s.

Even Ansel Adams had photographed destruction.

He was one of the pioneers.

Through Watkins and Adams's work, a lot of the natural forests and preserves-- Yosemite, etc., in the US, were created as a result of the images that they brought back.

I think photography is a very powerful way to tell the story of how we're transforming this planet.

I don't discourage them.

I don't want them to copy exactly what I'm doing.

But I don't discourage artists embracing that.

Because I think that story needs to be told far and wide by many of us.

The more people telling that story, the more we can raise consciousness around the events that are occurring today on the planet.

>> What about photography itself?

It would seem that the technology of photography may have reached its pinnacle.

Would you agree with that or will there always be advances that will make your work more creative, easier or accessible?

>> I do think it's reached an apex for sure.

The technology begins to crest.

Currently I'm working with a camera-- it's one of the best in the world with lenses that have been adapted and made specifically to handle a resolution at a medium format.

It's a phase camera, 150 megapixel.

In the natural order, I was making prints that were 60 by 80 inches.

You could go up to them, put your face 6 inches away and nothing breaks down.

Every twig, the texture of the bark.

Everything is present, there and defined.

You can go to a 200 or 250 megapixel.

But there's a cresting, a plateau-ing that happens.

We're near a plateau.

You can improve it but it's not going to make the experience of standing in front of the print much more noticeable.

>> Do you still have the same fire you had 40 years ago?

>> When you're in your 20s and 30s and up against incredible odds, you have to have a lot of hutzpah and ambition to get past all the obstacles.

And the crazy kinds of ways you had to work and the level.

I can honestly say I don't have to work as hard as I did back then.

Thank God, I don't think I could do it.

It's been pretty consistent that anybody I find who's been successful is not afraid of work.

Someone who's very successful once said to me, "The harder I work, the more successful I get".

I think there's a truth to that.

You don't get there by chance.

It's because you have an idea and you have the right drive and ambition.

You don't give up easily.

>> I want to ask you a question that I ask all our guests on Canada Files .

You're an internationally recognized artist.

You've travelled the world in all four corners.

What does being Canadian mean to you?

You live in Toronto.

You've been in this area all your life.

But you're internationally recognized.

Is that important to you?

What does it mean to you to know that you are recognized as Canadian.

>> I hold that as a badge of honour to be Canadian.

I do like this country a lot.

I had all the advantages of education and a healthcare system.

That there's been opportunity in this country.

I've gotten to invent myself.

I started pretty much with nothing.

It is the "start with nothing and build your life from nothing" story.

It is the Canadian Dream story.

If you look at the Great Lakes and the 2 million lakes north of the 49th.

It's over 30% of the world's fresh water.

We have some of the most vast tracts of forest that are still intact.

Knowing that place exists up there and there's a lot of this thing we call nature-- almost endless, is there.

That gives me some comfort and knowledge that we have that.

Having been able to experience that and really feel it has also allowed me the ability to lament its loss.

And to understand what losing it means.

But if you've never fallen in love with that wild space, then you'll never know its loss.

>> Ed, you've given all of us, and I mean all of the people who've seen your art throughout the world, a much better understanding of the planet that we are living on and maybe not doing our best to manage.

You've done it while creating magnificent art.

That's a very rare achievement.

Thank you very much for sharing this time with us on Canada Files .

>> Thank you Jim.

>> And thank you for joining us.

We'll see you next time with more Canada Files .

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