The Visual Language of Documentary Film: In Conversation with Jennifer Baichwal
By Amy Anderson | BeatRoute Canadian filmmaking trio Jennifer Baichwal, Nick de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky recently completed a trilogy of films that chronicle human impact upon the planet. Their most recent film, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, identifies a new era in which human influence is the most dominate factor determining the Earth’s form. The…
Read More
PODCAST: Ep. 3 – Anthropocene: The Human Epoch
TVO Podcasts “There’s no black and white here… there’s no easy answer to this dilemma we find ourselves in of tipping the Earth outside its natural limits.” — Jennifer Baichwal The team behind Manufactured Landscapes and Watermark is back with a new film that explores the ways human activity has fundamentally changed the planet. Colin sat down with filmmakers…
Read More
Review – Anthropocene: The Human Epoch
By Gideon Forman | Alternatives Journal To watch Anthropocene is to be saddened and overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by our remaking of the Earth’s surface through extractive industries; by the destruction of living creatures on land and at sea; and by the injury inflicted on humans, especially the poor, as they participate in these processes. Earlier societies harnessed and harmed…
Read More
Landmark Moment: We have our own geologic period. But it’s nothing to be proud of
By Jorge Ignacio Castillo | Planet S Magazine Anthropocene: The Human Epoch Roxy Theatre Opens Friday 26 Anthropocene: The Human Epoch is more than a film. It’s part of a larger project that includes art exhibitions, virtual and augmented reality, a coffee table book with photographs and essays by filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky and Nicolas de…
Read More
The Artist Capturing How Industry is Transforming the Natural World
By Alexander Hawkins | AnOther Magazine “Beauty” is not a word Edward Burtynsky wants associated with his large-format photographs of breathtaking industrial landscapes. Nevertheless, the Canadian photographer has been accused of aestheticising disaster. For almost 40 years, Burtynsky’s unsettling work has taken a bird’s-eye-view on how industry is spectacularly transforming nature, and our world. His interest, he insists,…
Read More
People vs the Planet
By Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky and Nicholas de Pencier | The Walrus Forests are indispensable to life on this planet. Nearly 1.6 billion people rely on them as sources of food, income, or shelter. Humans have altered over 75 percent of ice-free land on the planet with agriculture, mining, urbanization, and industrialization. And around half of the…
Read More
Edward Burtynsky surveys the devastating scale of man’s footprint on the planet
By Tom Seymour | Wallpaper* he Anthropocene photographs are huge, imposing and impossibly detailed, designed to stimulate in us a sense of awe – both of the beauty of the natural world, and the destruction our species has wrought upon it. They are images, the photographer says, ‘of a predator species run amok’. But few realise how personal…
Read More
The devastating environmental impact of human progress like you’ve never seen it before
By Nicola Davidson | WIRED UK In 1976, when he was a first-year student of photography at Ryerson Polytechnic Institute, in Toronto, Edward Burtynsky was given an assignment that would come to shape his working life. Instructed to go out and photograph “evidence of man”, he initially thought of ruins. What better evidence of man’s passing…
Read More
The Anthropocene Project
By Bel Jacobs | HowNow Magazine In face of current environmental events, debate around whether or not mankind now exists in the Anthropocene – an epoch in which human are the single most defining force on the planet and introduced in 2000 by chemist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Jozef Crutzen- seems to akin to re-arranging…
Read More
“The Idea is to Raise People’s Awareness of Issues” – an Interview with Andrea Kunard, Curator of Anthropocene
By Anna Savitskaya Artdependence Magazine Two simultaneous, complementary exhibitions of Anthropocene opened on September 28th at the National Gallery of Canada (NCG) and the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). The website dedicated to the exhibition defines Anthropocene as the current proposed geological epoch, in which humans are the primary cause of permanent planetary change. Three major artists: world-renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky and multiple…
Read More
The photographer sizing up the planet’s human footprint
By Leslie Hook Financial Times The word “ Anthropocene” first entered popular use about 20 years ago as scientists looked for a way to describe a new geologic era, one defined by the impact of humans. Earlier eras have been linked to climatic shifts caused by asteroids or ice ages, but now it is human…
Read More
‘It’s hard at this particular moment to be optimistic’ – Edward Burtynsky on the future of the planet
By Fatema Ahmed | Apollo Magazine The Canadian photographer talks to Fatema Ahmed about The Anthropocene Project – two exhibitions, a film and a book exploring man’s effect on Earth and capturing the spirit of what some scientists consider to be a new geological epoch. When did you become interested in the Anthropocene, and how did this project…
Read More
Anthropocene’s Jennifer Baichwal ponders the demented argument between technology and nature
By Adrian Mack | Georgia Straight Of the many technical wonders that we see in Anthropocene: The Human Epoch—if wonder is the right word— the Bagger 288 might be the most awe-inspiring. A bucket-wheel excavator that crawls implacably across the vast Tagebau Hambach open-pit coal mine in Germany, it looks like a gargantuan shopping mall on wheels…
Read More
Anthropocene film captures a world of devastation
By Mike Devlin | Times Colonist A new documentary from a team that includes acclaimed director Jennifer Baichwal looks at the impact modern civilization has had on Earth over thousands of years, and the results aren’t pretty. There have been significant hydrologic, atmospheric, biospheric and geological shifts during the Holocene period, most of which have been brought…
Read More
Interview: Edward Burtynsky Finds New Perspectives on the Anthropocene
By Rachel MacFarlane | FORMAT Magazine The renowned Canadian photographer discusses his latest work, which uses AR, film, and photography to document environmental change. October has been a busy month for Edward Burtynsky. Most significantly, the Canadian artist released a new series of his photographs, titled Anthropocene, on until November 3 at Toronto’s Nicholas Metivier Gallery. With collaborators…
Read More
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch makes viewers think about big issues
By Nathan Krause | Nexus Newspaper About a third of the way into Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, a man installing an electric car battery is wearing a T-shirt that states these words: “Don’t know, don’t care.” Director Jennifer Baichwal, who grew up in Victoria, has created a meditative film (the third in a series, following Manufactured Landscapes and Watermark)…
Read More
What happens when humans rule the Earth: Documenting the Anthropocene
By Collin Ellis TVO The trio of filmmakers behind the documentaries Manufactured Landscapes (2006) and Watermark(2013) are back with the visually stunning and sobering Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, which chronicles the impact human activity has had on the planet. An accompanying exhibition will run at the Art Gallery of Ontario until January 6. We sat down with Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky,…
Read More
Anthropocene Examines the Shocking Impact Humans Have on the Earth
By Truc Nguyen | NUVO Magazine This month, Anthropocene—a photography and multimedia art exhibition from artists Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal, and Nicholas de Pencier—opens simultaneously at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada, the first time the two museums have offered concurrent, complementary shows from the same artists. The Anthropocene Project also encompasses a feature documentary film arriving in theatres…
Read More
Beautiful pictures of terrible things
By Liz Braun | Toronto Sun The end of the world is beautiful to look at. See for yourself at Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, a new film that offers magnificent pictures of the mess humans have made on this planet. Anthropocene is the name of the current geological age, a period in which the dominant influence on…
Read More
Sprawling Anthropocene project shows humanity’s enormous impact on the planet
By Murray Whyte | Toronto Star The camera sweeps slowly, right to left, along a towering ridge of ochre stone. The sense is of the monumental — the kind of majesty and scale that only the primal force of violent nature, operating at planetary scale, could yield. Then you see it, and the world turns suddenly…
Read More
Anthropocene offers stunning and scary glances at the large-scale changes humanity has made to the planet
By Chris Knight | National Post ★★★★ Who knew the end of the world could be so beautiful? The latest eco-doc from Jennifer Baichwal (Manufactured Landscapes, Watermark), co-directed by Edward Burtynsky and Nicholas de Pencier, shows viewers some of the large-scale changes we are making to the planet. Like the second sunrise of a hydrogen bomb, they…
Read More
Age of Anthropocene: Art highlights human destruction of Earth
By Jesse Tahirali & Marlene Leung CTV News Rainbow mountains of coloured plastic. Artificial cliffs carved into a coal mine. Sheets of pale dirt shaved clean from a shrinking forest. Humanity’s fingerprints are pressed all over the Earth’s surface, and famed Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is putting them on full display at the Art Gallery of Ontario…
Read More
Cutting-edge artistry ushers in troubling new era
By Sandra Abma | CBC News This week on the list: a mind-boggling look at humankind’s impact on our planet, a showcase of animation’s best and brightest, and a big sound on a couple of small stages. Anthropocene Anthropocene, on now at the National Gallery of Canada, is a vivid voyage into the environmental catastrophe wrought by…
Read More
Anthropocene project highlights the apocalyptic beauty of humans’ effect on the planet
By CBC Radio: The Current The burning of 10,000 elephant tusks piled into an enormous funeral pyres in Kenya’s National Park in Nairobi is both a devastating and beautiful image to look at — a reaction that photographer Edward Burtynsky intended. His photographs are part of a multimedia project called Anthropocene that merges film, photography and…
Read More
Review: Anthropocene is a shocking and beautiful documentary
By Kate Taylor The Globe and Mail ★★★★ Vast rectangular ponds of foul yellow water lie evaporating in the Chilean desert; they will produce the lithium that powers electric-car batteries. A gorgeous red-and-grey rock is imprinted with an eye-catching circular pattern: It’s the mark of Russian potash mining, extracting one of the fertilizers that is…
Read More
Documenting our Man-Made Epoch
The Agenda with Steve Paikin Aired September 28 Photographer Edward Burtynsky, filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, and director of photography Nicholas De Pencier join Steve Paikin to discuss “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch.” The multifaceted project explores humankind’s tremendous effect on planet Earth. Watch the segment here.
Read More
The directing trio behind Anthropocene hope you walk away enlightened and transformed
By Chris Knight | National Post The three directors of Anthropocene: The Human Epoch are trying to describe the editing process required to bring an estimated 375 hours –15 days! – of footage down to a 90-minute documentary. Jennifer Baichwal likens it to a jigsaw puzzle. “Some people have the picture right there,” she says. “And some people…
Read More
New exhibit Anthropocene opens at the Art Gallery of Ontario
Metro Morning with Matt Galloway A new art exhibition opens today at the AGO, looking at how humans have irreversibly transformed the planet. We hear from the three artists at the centre of the project: photographer Edward Burtynsky and filmmakers filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier. Listen here.
Read More
Anthropocene art show and documentary will shock you with a view of human impact on the planet
By Kate Taylor The Globe and Mail The project, which includes not only a new documentary but also two museum exhibitions and an art book, gives a chilling, yet sometimes beautiful, examination of the indelible and spreading mark of human activity on the planet. Like some eerie sculpture, a dome-shaped pile of elephant tusks glimmers…
Read More
ANTHROPOCENE shows fierce beauty of rapidly collapsing Earth
By Peter Howell | Toronto Star ★★★★ ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch — a companion piece to exhibitions of the same name opening Friday at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery in Ottawa — is rife with such horrors, yet there’s a fierce beauty to the work of Baichwal, Burtynsky and de Pencier. They travel the…
Read More