The Sunday Edition for December 6th, 2009
What is the obligation of the artist to be a good citizen? Should art at its highest level serve the public interest or does it stand aloof and apart from policy debates? The answer is clear to Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. "As a citizen," he says, "I take a pretty strong stand." Indeed he does. For the past 25 years Burtinsky has been photographing the earth and what we humans have done to it. Enormous, dramatic landscapes of scrap piles,degraded forests and rivers, industrial depredation on a vast scale.
Yet the ugliness he photographs have a compelling beauty-- so individual are they that his work is housed in more than 50 museums around the world. Burtinsky grew up ion St. Catharines, Ontario. and studied photography at Ryerson University. His mission to photograph the impact of humans on their environment has taken him around the world.
In his latest work, Burtynsky: Oil, he explores what oil and its extraction from the earth has done to and for humanity. A feature interview with Edward Burtynsky in our first hour.
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