John K. Grande : What made you decide to start your photo lab, Toronto Image Works ?
Ed Burtynsky : When I graduated from Ryerson Polytechnic, there was no access to professional darkrooms in Toronto. After four years of working at home in the basement, I realized how inefficient my production was, and how impossible it became to realize the quality and scale of prints I envisioned. That was the original inspiration for Toronto Image Works. I decided not only to create something that would support my own creative printmaking, but also to open a facility for other artists in the city to use.
J. K. G. : One often hears of an artist dealing with the sacred earth as a subject, and though that is fine, this brand of art can be diminished by its avoidance of world problems caused by production, pollution, toxic earth, global warming. Artists cannot whitewash what is something very real with purist aesthetics, no matter how beautiful, or ritual, or superficially sacred they may be. Your photos touch on that strange duality, for they attract us with beauty.
E. B. : My early work looked at the pristine landscape in Canada and the United States, but after a couple of years of doing that I realized it was not enough. I wanted to probe much deeper, into the nature and visual result of our impact on the planet.
J. K. G. : Your Quarry photos are fascinating for the consecutive cut lines resemble classical architecture of Roman amphitheatres or, in the case of the Vermont quarries, modernist architectural forms. But all this you find in nature. This is outdoors, rational, and these sites were once untamed nature. How strange, this admixture of the pictorial tradition and industrial sublime in your photography. The sense of scale, of distance and of the space you find in your subjects is amazing. It captures aspects of various traditions in art and of the theatre that is life, part artificial and part natural.
E. B. : And in architectural appearance they are articulated in negative rather than positive space. This can best be seen in the Rock of Ages series, where the channelling and blasting out of the blocks of stone have created imitation-cliff palaces, like faux Mesa Verdes, uninhabitable habitats – complete with ladders reaching from ledge to ledge.
J. K. G. : Your Shipbreaking photographs from Bangladesh are taken in a Third World setting. They record a Third World industry devoted to taking apart ships that were once an integral part of the capitalist empire. The ship sections standing on shore are truly beautiful, rusted, textural and look like modernist sculptures. They even remind one of Richard Serra’s or David Smith’s sculptures. There is a strange, Romantic, quasi-colonial quality to your photos. We sense the photographer is a voyeur, a traveller, a temporary visitor to these sites. There is something of the 19th century travel photographers who captured views from distant lands for the people back home. One thinks of William Henry Jackson, Antonio Beato, Henri Béchard or William Notman. Maybe we are still living in a colonial era. Perhaps the scale of the colonialism has shifted and rendered the quaint old definition of a colony redundant.
E. B. : Yes, there is something of that in my work. It often involves expeditions, where I have two or three people who travel with me. I have a scout go on reconnaissance before me, so before I arrive at a site I know what the subject is, what locations are good, what permits are required, etc. And I hire locally as many as I need to get the job done. I have worked with as many as seven or eight people on such projects.
J. K. G. : Another stunning series you have done that is likewise sculptural is your Densified Scrap Metal photos from Hamilton, Ont. We are looking at compacted cubes of metal, but they are so varied and colourful, your photos capture the art in the everyday abstract expressionism meets the ready-made. This is conceptual sculpture with entropy built into it. (extrait)

ETC