Edward Burtynsky

Location: Ontario | Profession: Photographer

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Edward Burtynsky 1983

Ontario’s Edward Burtynsky is Canada’s most influential and widely-discussed photographer. His large format prints of industrial force the viewer to contemplate the tension between their innate beauty and the horrifying reality they depict. Recently, Burtynsky was invited to Chinas to photograph the construction of the controversial and awe-inspiring Three Gorges Dam project. That trip was captured by documentary filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, whose documentary Manufactured Landscapes won the Toronto-City Award for Best Canadian Feature at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Edward Burtynsky now

What They Said

“I graduated in 1982, and within three weeks of the ceremony, I got my first Canada Council Grant. I went to Ottawa and applied and four weeks later I had the money. That made the post-university transition so much easier. It’s a tender moment when you first come out of school. You’ve got debts and you don’t have a job. You’re pretty insecure. But to say “I’ve got a Canada Council Grant”, that meant people thought what I was doing was of worth. It made the transition much easier.

The subject of my project was industrial greenhouses: these artifical worlds we’d started creating to extend growing seasons. I ended up visiting 70 to 80 greenhouses throughout Southern Ontario. I initially honed in on a few and then started asking people if they could refer me to people with equally intersting structures.

The grant money wasn’t perfect, but it was enough. I gradually started selling work. There wasn’t a huge commercial market for the stuff I was doing, but a lot of institutions in Ottawa were buying. The Canada Council Art Bank was purchasing work and the National Film Board Stills Division (which is now the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography) was buying some as well. But I needed to do quite a bit of freelance work in architectural photography to keep afloat. It was large-format and the pace and process were similar to landscape photography, so I actually enjoyed it and learned from it. In fact, I still do quite a bit of architectural photography. It keeps my vision honed and suits my temperament.

In 1985, I started the Image Works lab in Toronto. I had a peppered job history and no real lab experience, but I wanted to start a business and felt there was a market for it. I went to all the places I was trying to emulate and I took note of what they were doing right and what they were doing wrong. The biggest mistake I saw was that they were all rather hodge-podge operations. A guy would save up $50,000, build four dark rooms, buy four enlargers and a 24 inch processor and a counter and then buy and build more further down the line. As far as I saw it, you could never keep a loyal client base that way. I went out and bough the best of everything: the best enlargers, the best lenses, the best dark rooms. I also created a dark area so people wouldn’t have to re-package their paper. You lose so much from kinks and dents. We had a microswitch so all the power would go off in the dark room and in the hallway. That way, you could feed in the print right away without having to repackage your paper to keep it lightsafe.

Because I put in all this thinking, when I went to banks and investors, I could honestly tell them I had the ultimate solution. I could confidently say that with 1.5 million people in Toronto and a university that needed a place for their overflow to go when their dark rooms got too busy, there was a definite market. I was asking for $250,000 and people responded because they respected how methodical my approach had been. Those same darkrooms and lenses are still here 20 years later.“