Edward Burtynsky Named Photo London's 2018 Master of Photography

Photo London has announced Canadian fine art photographer Edward Burtynsky as its Master of Photography for 2018. Burtynsky’s practice eloquently chronicles human impact on the planet and his images are widely regarded as key visual documents of our time. As part of Photo London’s 2018 Public Programme, Burtynsky will present a special exhibition of new and rarely-seen work including a preview of his latest project Anthropocene. Known for pushing the technical limits of photography in his work, Burtynsky will also present a newly developed Augmented Reality (AR) experience.

Burtynsky is currently engaged in a five-year project on the Anthropocene, a proposed name for our present geological age in which humans have had a profound influence on the earth and its systems. A multi-disciplinary endeavour with longtime collaborators Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, the Anthropocene exhibition will feature images exploring diverse subjects such as urbanisation, industrialisation and extraction, from oil bunkering and sawmills in Nigeria to the salt mines of the Ural Mountains; at once conveying the sublime qualities of human-marked landscapes and the unsettling reality of sweeping resource depletion. “We’ve had five great extinctions,” Burtynsky says, referring to prehistoric devastations from the “Great Dying” of the Permian eruptions, to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. “Now our species is having a similar effect—we are the equivalent of a meteor impact."

Co-presented by the Art Gallery of Ontario and National Gallery of Canada, and co-produced by MAST Foundation in Bologna, Italy, the Anthropocene exhibition will open in September 2018 in Toronto and Ottawa.

To accompany the exhibition at Photo London, supported by the High Commission of Canada, Burtynsky will be speaking as part of the acclaimed annual Photo London Talks Programme on Thursday 17 May. The full Talks Programme, which is supported by Arts Council England, will be announced in early April, with speakers already confirmed including Joel Meyerowitz, Cornelia Parker, Susan Lipper, Bruce Gilden, and Vera Lutter.

Source: Photo London 2018