Edward Burtynsky

“I remember the first roll of film I took. It was wintertime, and I wanted to shoot a roll of film to practice processing it, so I took an entire 36-exposure roll of my dog, Tippy.”

“Somebody referred to what I do as subliminal activism, which I like.”

“I came out of a blue-collar town, a GM town, and my father worked at GM, so I was very familiar with that kind of industry and that also informed my work.”

“I'm of the belief that you pursue your interests, you pull it all in, and you sort it out later.”

“Wherever you disrupt water from its natural cycle, there's always a winner and a loser. Whoever is the one it's directed towards is the winner, and whoever loses that water is the loser.”

“I had to work to put myself through school, so I always worked in the heaviest industries I could find because that's who paid the best.”

“We have extracted from the land from the moment we stood on two feet. We are working to supply the kinds of materials that are necessary for the lives we've built for ourselves.”

“I like to think of Photography 1.0 as the invention of photography. Photography 2.0 is digital technology and the move from film and paper to everything on a chip. Photography 3.0 is the use of the camera, space, and color and to capture an object in the third dimension.”

“I have always been interested in following the technology that I feel are presenting themselves as true industry and innovation.”

“I no longer see my world as delineated by countries with borders or language, but as seven billion humans living off a single, finite planet.”

“I love the tones of browns and grays - I love more neutral tones. That's why I like going to the desert and working in the desert. I find that green trees and things like that have a tendency to lock us into a certain way of seeing.”

“I'm working in this very complex set of issues having to do with who we are as a species and how much we can do to the Earth before it starts to buckle under. My work can easily read as an indictment, but I don't see it as that simple a problem.”

“As artists, we can help, visually and intellectually, to make people understand that, at some point, we have to accept that it is our collective impact that is putting the whole planet in jeopardy.”

“Berlin has a uniquely haunting nature, symbolic of a problematic system that was created to oppress and divide a nation.”

“Good governance takes behavior that is negative or not helpful to the greater good of society, whether it's polluting behaviour, plastics, or whatever, and taxes the behaviour.”

“Water, like many other resources, is harvested, transported and used throughout all aspects of society. Unlike other resources, water is critical to the survival of all forms of life. The underlying question that sits at the core of my exploration is to what degree can we shape water before it begins to shape us.”

“I think the environmental movement has failed in that it's used the stick too much; it's used the apocalyptic tone too much; it hasn't sold the positive aspects of being environmentally concerned and trying to pull us out.”

“I have a fondness for when the landscape becomes surreal.”

“Our planetary system is affected by a magnitude of force as powerful as any naturally occurring global catastrophe, but one caused solely by a single species: us.”