Paul Kyle Gallery is pleased to present Burtynsky: Human/Nature, a major exhibition of photographs by Edward Burtynsky, one of the most important and influential image-makers of our time. Featuring works from the early 1990s to the present, Human/Nature presents a survey of Burtynsky’s practice through photographs drawn from several of his most celebrated series.

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Internationally recognized for his large-scale photographs of quarries, mines, oil fields, manufacturing sites, shipbreaking yards, water systems, recycling fields, and other transformed landscapes, Burtynsky has spent decades making visible the vast material systems that sustain contemporary life while leaving profound marks on the earth. His photographs do not simply document the world, they reveal it back to us with unusual clarity, showing the physical consequences of human ambition at a scale that is at once aesthetic, historical, and philosophical.

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What has long distinguished Burtynsky’s work is its ability to hold beauty and disturbance in the same frame. His photographs are visually arresting in their colour, structure, composition, and scale, yet they do not offer beauty as consolation. Instead, they draw the viewer into a more difficult recognition: that the world we have built is inseparable from the land we have altered, and that the marks of human industry now shape the visible surface of the planet with extraordinary force.

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Human/Nature speaks directly to one of the exhibition’s central tensions. It does not suggest a simple harmony between humanity and the natural world, nor does it preserve the illusion that the two can still be cleanly separated. Rather, it names a condition of entanglement. In these works landscape becomes record, evidence, and inscription.

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Born in St. Catharines, Ontario, in 1955, Burtynsky grew up in the industrial and agricultural atmosphere of the Niagara region, where the General Motors plant and the Welland Canal formed part of the visual fabric of daily life. That early exposure to labour, machinery, land, and water helped shape a way of seeing that would later expand across the globe. Through his career, Burtynsky has remained committed to showing the full complexity of a world in which beauty and use, labour and magnitude, making and unmaking remain bound together.

 

For Paul Kyle, the exhibition is both a privilege and a deeply felt responsibility. “Edward Burtynsky is an artist whose work matters not only visually, but morally, philosophically, and historically,” says Paul Kyle. “His photographs do not simply document the world; they ask us to reckon with it. Few artists make us feel both humility and accountability so powerfully. There is something profoundly moving in that act of seeing. His work captures the marks humanity leaves upon the land, while also revealing the difficult and undeniable beauty of those transformations. It is a tremendous privilege to work with Edward Burtynsky and to share these extraordinary photographs with our community.”

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With Human/Nature, Paul Kyle Gallery invites audiences to encounter Burtynsky’s photographs not only as images of environmental transformation, but as works of profound visual intelligence and moral seriousness.

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

Edward Burtynsky is regarded as one of the world’s most accomplished contemporary photographers. His remarkable photographic depictions of global industrial landscapes represent more than 40 years of dedication to bearing witness to the impact of humans on the planet.

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Burtynsky’s photographs are included in the collections of over 80 major museums around the world, including Tate Modern in London; MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; SFMOMA in San Francisco; the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts; and the National Gallery of Canada and Art Gallery of Ontario. His work is also held by major collectors including Michael Wilson, Sir Elton John, Andy and Christine Hall, and Edward Norton. Prime Minister Mark Carney has also recently selected a Burtynsky print for his office.

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Major exhibitions include The Great Acceleration at the International Center of Photography, New York (2025); BURTYNSKY: Extraction/Abstraction (2024–), which premiered at London’s Saatchi Gallery before travelling to the M9 Museum in Mestre, Italy, and opening at the Seoul Museum of History in December 2025; Anthropocene (2018–2023); Water (2013–ongoing), organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art and Contemporary Arts Center, Louisiana; Oil(2009) at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; China (2005–2010); and Manufactured Landscapes (2003) at the National Gallery of Canada.

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Burtynsky’s distinctions include the inaugural TED Prize in 2005, the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts, the Outreach Award at Rencontres d’Arles, the Roloff Beny Book Award, and the 2018 Photo London Master of Photography Award. In 2019 he received the Arts & Letters Award at the Canadian Association of New York’s Maple Leaf Ball and the Lucie Award for Achievement in Documentary Photography. In 2020 he was awarded a Royal Photographic Society Honorary Fellowship, and in 2022 he received the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award from the World Photography Organization, was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame, and received the Pollution Probe Award. In 2023 he received the PHotoESPAÑA Award for Professional Career and the Pino Pascali Prize. Most recently, he was ranked number two on The Independent’s Climate List 2025.

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Burtynsky was also a key production figure in the award-winning documentary trilogy Manufactured Landscapes (dir. Jennifer Baichwal, 2006), Watermark (dir. Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky, 2013), and Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (dir. Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier, and Edward Burtynsky, 2018).

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Burtynsky currently holds nine honorary doctorate degrees.