Photographer Edward Burtynsky’s stunning pictures don’t just show the impact of humanity’s industrial footprint on our planet. They scale it to a register that feels uncanny, mesmerizing … even sublime.
With a Burtynsky photo, you find yourself staring, seduced by composition and rhythm and detail … only to realize, maybe with a shudder, that the subject is slag or oil sands tailings, feedlots or quarries. The renowned Canadian artist famously captures natural sites that have been transformed by industry. A globetrotter, he has made his way into famous, infamous, and sometimes jealously guarded sites here in Canada and the US, as well as in distant lands like China, Bangladesh, Italy and Australia.
His subjects include mines and factories; oil extraction sites and refineries; shipbreaking yards, manufacturing sites and recycling yards; water management and irrigation sites; and rapidly growing cities and construction sites. When we meet on a cold Thursday in January, he explains that he aims to be “revelatory… to pull the curtain back on the worlds – and the scale of those worlds — that it takes for us to have this world”. And critically, to have you “not avert your eyes.”
This curtain parts memorably at Art in Action: Climate Festival, a 10-day event in St. Catharines, Ontario that is anchored by Burtynsky’s immersive installation In the Wake of Progress. Running January 30 to February 8, 2026 at the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre, the festival includes daily screenings of In the Wake of Progress every 30 minutes (reservations required), a film festival, performances, a climate symposium, and partner exhibitions across Niagara.
Seeds in steel and water
For Burtynsky, the festival is a homecoming. He grew up here, and his visual grammar was forged in Niagara. “It was quite formative”, he recalls, “watching the big ships go up the Welland Canal, or seeing the big presses at GM pounding out steering knuckles and red-hot ingots. Men in aluminum suits… the earth shaking.” As a child, he visited open houses at the plant where his father worked: “I remember being a kid going, ‘Wow, this is how the car gets made.’”
That revelation planted a realization that has fueled a lifetime of curiosity: “Everything I see in front of me has been made somewhere.” So taken was he with this idea of making things that he initially felt destined to become a tool-and-die maker himself – until canceled apprenticeship programs nudged him toward Niagara College’s graphic arts program and, ultimately, to Toronto Metropolitan University (then Ryerson).
There, he “fell in love with the medium” of photography and built the worldview — art history, psychology, sociology — that would help him to envision possibilities and negotiate access to remote, spectacular places like China’s largest factories. From early on, his goal was to create lasting resonance, not a fleeting moment of attention: “I was always looking through my 4×5 or 8×10” lens, asking myself, “Will anybody care about this picture in 50 years?”
Photography: the non-negotiables
With that question driving his art, certain truths have remained firm: first, his understanding that “Photography, as the ultimate realist tool, renders reality in a way nothing else can.” In service of that, Burtynsky has always chased the highest resolution he could afford, “to stay at the vanguard of image quality”. The tools of his trade have evolved — from 8×10 film to medium-format digital and drones —but the ethos hasn’t.
That said, he draws a firm line at digital manipulation: “I do not use Photoshop as a compositional tool.” Retouching an image to remove dust or the inadvertent “pop can in the corner” of a much larger shot is acceptable, but “never… bringing people into the picture who weren’t there” or “merging two different images into a third thing.”
This documentary honesty creates an intentional tension: “I always wanted the images to appear like I did something to get them there. But I didn’t.”
When the archive moves
Translating decades of his still images into a 20-minute, multi-screen installation changed his view of his work. He had always thought of his work as discrete series of photos with shifting subjects — from mining to quarries to refineries to oil fields to recycling yards. Then, a 1997 National Gallery of Canada exhibition with curator Lori Pauli reframed that: “I was thinking, ‘What’s my next thing I’m going to do?’ and she started to build the case that these were all part of a larger idea.”
To that point, Burtynsky had never understood the interconnectedness of his work: “I just saw myself like a basketball player with one foot planted on the ground and the other pivoting around.” Now he started to see that the “pivot grew out of one sentiment: I was trying to understand what was happening to nature as a result of human expansion and the population growth curve. And looking at the scale of what I was seeing as a young person working in these industries—whether it was the auto industry or mining—then looking at where population growth was going, I was seeing that … Adam Smith’s notion of the economy—the invisible hand of the market, price and consumption—works … until you run out.”
Smith’s notion “presupposes we live in an infinite world.” But Burtynsky saw the truth: “I was seeing there are finite limits: you can only take so many fish out of the ocean. There’s only going to be so much accessible copper you can get at before it’s too far away or under the ocean. Supply and demand has a limitation—on the supply side.”
“I intuitively knew that if I kept photographing large‑scale industries, at some point the world would meet me and understand what I was doing.” In the Wake of Progress makes that idea visceral and inescapable. Leveraging his life’s work, the installation “takes you on a roller-coaster ride through examples of the human footprint on the planet,” buttressed by immersion in nature at both ends.
It’s “a kind of lament — a 40-year lament on the loss of nature to our success, while showing that success.” In a complex blend of celebration and mourning, imagery and music swell to a crescendo, then — in keeping with Burtynsky’s ethos — find an exit that is uplifting, not despairing. That exit is water: “Water to me represents incredible hope. …In a polluted river, if we just stop putting pollutants in, … the springs and the runoff will clear out the damaged stuff. We could literally … be drinking that water within a year. It’s very resilient.”
“And the fact that I come from the greatest concentration of fresh water on the planet—which is the Great Lakes—is fitting. I went to some of the most beautiful rivers and to the greatest of all the lakes Lake Superior, and celebrated the water. That’s how I ended the piece: in a celebration of nature and water and its ability to heal.” Water is an inspiration that points a way forward: “It’s this miraculous, self‑healing element on the planet that even we can’t screw up. We can try to screw it up, but we can’t fully.”
Ethics and “forbidden beauty”
At this point, it is needless to say that Burtynsky’s art refuses easy binaries: “I’ve tried not to turn the work into a polemic. I don’t want it to be an indictment.” His reasoning is unassailable: we are all implicated: “We can go to an oil field and decry what it’s doing to us, but each and every one of us is relying on it. Right now, I’m sitting in a room. I bet natural gas is being burned somewhere to keep me warm.”
So he chooses seduction and structure over scolding. And he rejects questions about the ethics of aestheticizing environmental harm. “Would you ask whether Shakespeare, telling terrible stories in Richard III or Macbeth… was right to cloak them in beautiful prose? Is Apocalypse Now, where every frame is luscious and drips off the screen, to be questioned for using aesthetics to tell a tough story?”
What he seeks is ultimately not prettiness. It’s compulsion: “I want to engage the viewer; I want to communicate with the viewer. It’s a duality—like a forbidden beauty. I should not be enjoying it, but there’s something that really draws me to it.” He locates scenes and shoots perspectives that are visually compelling: “By coaxing those deep archetypes and using a kind of iconography around mining, quarries, industry, production, you feel it, without being told ‘this is right or wrong’—you sense an imbalance at work.”
And critically, you own your own conclusions. This is his deliberate response to the “world of opinions” we live in: “It’s more interesting, emotionally, not to tell the person what to think. If you show somebody and take them on a journey, and they come out the other side feeling they’ve seen something that has a truth to it … you have a better chance of leaving an impression—some reflection—that maybe there is a problem.”
And from there, perhaps … insight grows: “We’re all part of the problem. Maybe I am, too. Maybe I can even do something about it.”
What we mine, and why it matters
His work has long probed the collision of finite resources with infinite appetites. Early in school, he spent every spare moment photographing the Holland Marsh because “agriculture is the single greatest terraforming project humans have ever done”, dwarfing even urban land use, which makes up just 1% of the earth. As his career grew, he chased the largest exemplars of our other projects — factories, dams, extraction sites — to make the scope of our terraforming legible “in one frame.”
In the Wake of Progress—in its complex beauty and its digital form—intersects directly with the difficult transition ahead. “One can make an argument that the way to save us now is to mine the s*** out of the planet and get on with getting everything electrified, with more power lines and more power generation.” It’s not about stopping progress, Burtynsky offers: it’s about recalibrating it.
He likens it to “what I saw happen to photography, going from consumables—chemistry, paper, film, plastics, gelatin, silver, all those things of the real world—to ones and zeros.” The digital world has effectively “dematerialized photography”: “When I started, every picture had to be processed and printed to see. Now, less than 1% of pictures are processed and then turned into prints and used materially.”
Just as his medium shifted from consumables to durables, “that’s precisely the paradigm shift we need” at large. Over time, we will “have to stop burning oil, gas, and coal. The only way to do that is heat pumps, electric cars, geothermal, solar, wind. Where’s that all come from? That’s all materials: stuff out of the ground.” We will need nickel, copper, lithium and aluminum to save the planet — and the discipline not to “do it so much we pollute the water downstream.”
Bluntly speaking, “If you truly care about the planet and the future for your kids, we need to mine—or we need to have a massive die‑off. There are only two choices.”
Why go to “Art in Action”?
The answer is simple: to be provoked, and possibly transformed.
Five minutes after leaving In the Wake of Progress, Burtynsky hopes audiences feel “somewhat overwhelmed — almost shocked into seeing the world in a way they’re not familiar with”, yet clear-eyed that “it is our world.”
Five years later? Ideally, they’ll still hear that low industrial percussion — the “continuous ‘bang, bang’” of his childhood — reframed as a metronome for choices we keep making every day.
Don’t go to Burtynsky’s show to get away from it all — “this isn’t escapism,” he says. Go to be awed, and to have your sense of scale complicated and recalibrated. Like water which, “left alone … heals itself,” the first healing step may be leaving ourselves alone for 20 minutes: to look, with attention, and without flinching, at what it takes to live the way we live. That discipline is a durable we can all afford.
Art in Action: Climate Festival runs January 30–February 8, 2026 at the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre in St. Catharines, with daily In the Wake of Progress screenings (Jan 31–Feb 8; reservations required). For complete schedules and tickets: artinactionniagara.ca and firstontariopac.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
