Last Week of Burtynsky's HUMAN/NATURE
- Diamond Kyle
- Aug 29
- 17 min read
welcome to our
SATURDAY EVENING POST
August 29th, 2026
By Diamond Kyle
Written with time, thought, and a human pulse.
We have entered the final week of Edward Burtynsky’s Human/Nature, closing Saturday, September 5, and if you have been meaning to see the exhibition, I would urge you seize the opportunity. Burtynsky’s photographs are so widely reproduced that it is easy to mistake familiarity with the image for an encounter with the work itself, yet these photographs depend upon scale, detail and time. They often reach us first through beauty, colour, geometry, pattern and extraordinary compositional order, and only afterward reveal the histories and consequences contained within them. That movement between attraction and recognition is fundamental to the work: the photograph does not tell us what to think before we look, instead, it makes us look closely enough that thinking becomes a profound experience with these works.
Some of the stories behind the works are almost difficult to believe. In Nickel Tailings #31, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996, the brilliant orange running through the blackened landscape is not digitally manipulated colour but iron oxide, discarded after the more profitable nickel, copper and other metals have been removed, what Burtynsky describes simply as rivers of rust. In Oxford Tire Pile #9a and #9b, Westley, California, 1999, tens of millions of discarded tires had accumulated into mountains approaching thirty metres high; not long after Burtynsky photographed them, lightning struck the site and the resulting fire sent toxic black smoke hundreds of metres into the atmosphere for a month. And AMARC #3, Tucson, Arizona, 2006, depicting the extraordinary accumulation of retired military aircraft in the desert, also marks a turning point in Burtynsky’s own practice: the aerial shoot produced his first digital image made from a helicopter using a gyro-stabilized Hasselblad, convincing him that digital photography could finally give him the control he needed in the air.
Other works reveal something more complicated than destruction. Stepwell #1, Nahargarh Cistern, Jaipur, India, 2010, with its almost impossible geometry of descending stone steps, records a highly sophisticated communal water system designed centuries ago to collect monsoon rains and sustain communities through the dry season. Once diminished by the introduction of pumps and modern water infrastructure, such stepwells have since been reconsidered in regions where newer systems have failed to solve water scarcity. In Xiaolangdi Dam #4, Yellow River, Henan Province, China, 2011, the enormous brown eruption is the annual release of some thirty million tons of accumulated silt, which is a spectacle watched by tens of thousands of people. The dam supplies hydroelectric power, irrigation, drinking water and flood control, while its construction also required the resettlement of at least 200,000 people. Burtynsky continually brings us into precisely this difficult territory, where extraordinary human engineering and its costs cannot be separated into neat opposing categories.
The more recent works extend that contradiction into the technologies and resources shaping our own future. In Lithium Mines #2, Salt Flats, Atacama Desert, Chile, 2017, mineral-rich brine is pumped from beneath one of the driest non-polar deserts on earth into evaporation ponds whose changing chemical concentrations produce an extraordinary sequence of colours. Lithium is central to rechargeable batteries and electric vehicles, making the photograph an image not simply of extraction but of the material infrastructure beneath many of our hopes for a lower-carbon future. In Uralkali Potash Mine #8, Berezniki, Russia, 2017, intensely coloured strata 350 metres underground are the remains of an ancient seabed, now carved into an enormous subterranean network by the extraction of potash for industrial fertilizer; beneath Berezniki, thousands of kilometres of tunnels have contributed to sinkholes large enough to swallow roads and buildings above.
And then Burtynsky gives us something entirely different. Natural Order #18, Grey County, Ontario, Canada, Spring, 2020, emerged from land he has known for decades and came during a period when, after some forty years of examining humanity’s pressure upon the natural world, he returned his camera to the dense and apparently chaotic growth of the landscape itself. He described his relationship with the property as having shifted from ownership toward stewardship and the work as a return to the understanding that we are “of, and inseparable from, nature.”
These are only a handful of the histories contained within Human/Nature. Seen together, the works move through extraction, waste, water, agriculture, energy, technology and landscapes that remain astonishingly beyond our making, and they do so without reducing any of those subjects to an easy moral conclusion. The photographs are beautiful, but their beauty continually complicates what we know we are seeing.
These works are available for purchase, please contact the gallery.
A note on our wedding
A wedding is, in the traditional sense, an emotionally and logistically demanding event. There are people to account for, meals to confirm, seating arrangements to reconsider, beverages to purchase, flowers to arrange, speeches to print, place cards to make, musicians to coordinate, timings to rehearse, and an almost endless succession of small decisions that seem perfectly manageable until they begin to multiply. There is also, inevitably, the conviction that one should have a backup of everything: another copy of the seating chart, another copy of the speech, extra flowers, extra chairs, extra drinks, extra printouts, and perhaps, if one were being entirely sensible, some provision for the possibility that one has somehow forgotten either an object or a person.
But the logistical side of the wedding was never what frightened us very much. We run a gallery, and after years of exhibitions, openings, film screenings, musical performances, dinners, installations, private events and every conceivable variation of people gathering around art, we are accustomed to the chaos that precedes an event. We solve technical problems, spatial problems, timing problems and people problems. We work with artists, musicians, shippers, caterers, organizations, sound systems, lighting systems, artworks, walls, tables, chairs, flowers, food and drink, and we have learned that almost anything can be solved if enough people remain calm and someone knows where the extension cords are. We have worked in spaces too small for the number of people arriving, with things that did not arrive when they were meant to, with objects that were more difficult to install than anyone anticipated, with last-minute changes, cancellations and surprises. After enough years of this, one develops a certain confidence. Events themselves are no longer mysterious, they are simply things that must be thought through carefully and then carried out.
So when people asked whether we had a wedding planner, it seemed almost unnecessary. Between our team, our friends and the professionals we had brought in, we had the mechanics of the day under control. What I had not understood was that the difficult part of a wedding was not the event.
This is a more personal note than I usually write for the gallery, although perhaps it is not entirely outside the character of what I have been doing here for years. Those of you who have been reading regularly have heard us think through art, artists, history, society, institutions, taste, aesthetics, community and all the things that interest or trouble us. Writing this way inevitably gives away a certain amount of one’s interior life. Over time, a reader comes to know what we admire, what we distrust, what moves us and what irritates us, and there is something almost intimate in that repetition. You may not know everything about us, but many of you know enough that you could walk through the gallery door and already understand something of the way we see the world.
That was partly why I wrote about marriage in art immediately before my own wedding. It was not meant as a general survey alone. I wanted to think about marriage before entering into it, to look at what artists had made of that strange, old and persistent human decision to bind one life to another. This, then, is the note that comes after.
For most of our professional lives, the events we organize have been about other people. An opening belongs to the artist, a screening belongs to the filmmaker and the film. A musical performance belongs to the musicians. Even when we have planned every detail, stood in the room for hours before anyone arrived, moved the furniture, adjusted the lights, checked the sound, organized the refreshments and worried about whether everything would work, there comes a moment just before the doors open when all that preparation recedes. People begin to arrive, and our attention turns outward.
I have always loved that moment. Sometimes the room fills slowly, sometimes it fills all at once. We greet people we know and people we have never met, introduce one person to another, explain the work on the walls, talk about why an artist matters, why a film deserves to be seen, why a musician should be heard. New friendships begin in these rooms. Collectors meet artists. Artists meet other artists. Someone encounters a work they had never expected to care about. Someone sees something in a new way. There are conversations that lead nowhere and conversations that unexpectedly change the direction of someone’s life or work. The point of the evening is never us. Our job is to make room for attention to settle on someone or something else.
That is the work, and much of what we pride ourselves on is invisible. Sometimes it means finding the right language for a work when a collector cannot yet see what we see in it. Sometimes it means making a difficult installation appear effortless. Sometimes it means mediating hesitation, doubt, uncertainty or disagreement. Sometimes a client cannot imagine the work in the room; sometimes a spouse cannot imagine it at all. We persuade, explain, move, rehang, reconsider, make a case, and occasionally step out of the way. We do not expect to be congratulated for that part. If an artist feels properly represented, if an audience understands something better, if the work has been allowed to speak clearly, then we have done our job. Our attention is, by definition, directed elsewhere.
This is why I was not prepared for what happened on Sunday.
At around two in the afternoon, I was still at the venue with a group of wonderful ladies arranging flowers, placing cards, adjusting details and watching the room gradually become the place we had imagined. Perhaps seventy percent of it was complete when I had to leave. I was not permitted to return until 5:50, only minutes before the ceremony was to begin, and leaving felt unnatural. I am used to being in the room until the last possible moment, knowing what is happening, seeing what remains unfinished, watching the final pieces settle into place. Instead, I had to walk away from an event I had spent months organizing and trust that it would continue without me.
When I returned, the room was no longer the room I had left. The tables were finished. The flowers were in place. People were seated. Everyone was dressed. The room was full of faces I knew, faces from different decades and different parts of our lives, all gathered in one place. In a few minutes, “Here Comes the Sun” by The Beatles would begin, my bridesmaids would walk, and then it would be my turn. My mother was beside me, preparing to give me away under what we had already described as a strict no-return policy. Her dress was slightly too long, I had forgotten the exact musical cue, and I realized I had not drunk enough water. I thought about my black Issey Miyake dress and whether my makeup would survive whatever was about to happen. My daughter had assured me that it was waterproof.
And then I looked at the room and understood, quite suddenly, that everyone was there for us. It is difficult to explain why this was so overwhelming. Of course, we had known intellectually that the people had been invited to our wedding. We had made the guest list, we had worked on the seating arrangements, we knew who was coming and who was not. But knowing something administratively is not the same as understanding it emotionally. We are used to rooms full of people, but those rooms are usually gathered around something else.
There was no artwork to present and no artist behind whom I could disappear. The occasion itself was our life, and the people in the room had come because they cared about it.
I have words for most emotional states. I have always relied on language that way. Apprehension, tenderness, exhilaration, grief, wonder, gratitude, vulnerability, disorientation, longing, relief, terror, ecstasy, despair, awe, panic, devotion, heartbreak, rapture, shame, astonishment, yearning, dread, elation, helplessness, reverence, fury, surrender: I can usually identify what I am feeling and put some language around it. But what happened in that moment exceeded any single name. It was a convergence of feeling: joy so intense it felt almost violent, braided with sorrow, gratitude with disbelief, love with a sudden and almost frightening sense of exposure. I felt unsteady, overwhelmed, almost undone by the knowledge that all these people had come to witness us, to hold this moment with us, to see us make a promise from which there would be no graceful retreat. The happiness was enormous, but it was not simple. It carried the weight of everything we had survived, everyone we had lost, every version of ourselves we had outgrown, and every uncertain year still ahead. I began to cry, and then immediately thought about my makeup, and then developed a runny nose, which made the whole business impractical. I began smiling instead and then found that I could not quite stop. Somewhere between tears and laughter, between panic and wonder, between worrying about my mother’s hem and remembering that I was supposed to walk, I surrendered to the fullness of the moment and went forward.
Before the wedding, many of our friends who had been married for decades told me that the day would pass in a blur. One particularly witty friend compared it to being under general anaesthesia: you wake up afterward and are told that something important has happened. I understood what they meant, but I did not want that. We had spent months preparing for this day, and I wanted to be conscious for it. I wanted to experience it fully, even if that meant feeling every inconvenient part of it.
I had privately joked to myself beforehand that I wanted to give birth without the epidural, although I never said it aloud, and in some peculiar emotional sense, that is what I did. I did not try to remain composed enough to turn the day into a perfect memory. I allowed it to be messy in the way real experience is messy. I let myself be tired. I let myself be anxious. I let myself be moved. I let myself cry, laugh, worry, forget things, recover them, speak to people, miss people, and notice the room. I tried to see as many people as I could because I knew what it meant to me and to them that they had made the effort to come. Some had travelled a long distance, some had reorganised their lives to be there, some represented entire chapters of ours. They had made an effort to show up for us, and I wanted to be present enough to understand that.
The day was not a blur, I remember it with extraordinary clarity, I remember looking around and thinking about the people who could not be there, and about the people we might have invited if a room did not have a fixed capacity. I thought about whether someone had been seated too far away, whether another person had a better view, whether someone had enough to eat, whether everyone could hear. Apparently even at my own wedding, some part of me remained in event mode. But eventually even those thoughts became less important than what was actually happening. People were there, they were talking, laughing, listening, meeting one another. Old friends were sitting beside people they had never met. Parts of our lives that had previously existed separately were sharing the same room. If someone left having made one new friend, discovered one unexpected connection, had one conversation they would remember, then I think we did something right.
But a wedding is not only a gathering, and I do not want the scale of the event to obscure the seriousness of the marriage itself. For all the preparation that surrounds it, marriage ultimately depends upon a remarkably simple act: two people make a promise to one another in public.
The longer I thought about my vow, the less interested I became in promising happiness. Happiness matters, of course, but no one can responsibly promise another person a life without difficulty. What I wanted to promise Paul was something more durable: that hardship would not automatically be interpreted as failure; that when difficulty comes, as it inevitably does in every long life, I would remain committed to meeting it with him rather than regarding it as evidence that something between us had gone wrong.
To me, commitment means accepting that love carries responsibilities. It means care, respect and trust, but also discipline. It means knowing when to lead and when to follow, when to speak and when to listen, when to insist and when to yield. It means accepting that two people will continue to change and that the promise is not made only to the versions of us standing there on one particular day. It is made also to the people we are still becoming.
There is something profoundly serious in that idea. We live in a culture that is very good at beginnings, we celebrate newness, reinvention, transformation, possibility. Marriage asks a different question, it asks what it means to continue. What does it mean to stay beside another person over time? What does it mean to honour a trust when circumstances are no longer new or exciting, when life becomes complicated, when health changes, when work becomes difficult, when families change, when certainty gives way to uncertainty? The promise, if it is to mean anything, must be large enough to contain realities we cannot yet imagine.
That is what I wanted my vow to mean.
Paul and I have already built a great deal of life together. The gallery is part of that life, our work is part of it. Our family, our friendships and our community are part of it. Marriage does not replace any of those things, rather, it gives a different form to the commitment beneath them. It says publicly that we intend to continue not merely alongside one another, but in responsibility to one another, and that this responsibility is not a temporary arrangement dependent upon perfect circumstances.
One of the most moving moments of the evening came when the children spoke. Their speeches were among the great gifts of the wedding for me because they were entirely their own. There is something very strange about listening to your children stand before a room and speak from their hearts. Parents spend so many years correcting, encouraging, worrying, teaching, advising and occasionally repeating themselves into what appears to be complete silence that it can be startling to discover that all this time the children have been becoming people.
They stood there with their own humour, their own observations, their own generosity, their own understanding of us, and I found myself not only moved by what they said but deeply grateful for who they have become. There are things in life for which we are tempted to take credit, and there are things we should receive more humbly. Watching children grow into thoughtful, loving human beings belongs, I think, to the second category. We may provide some of the conditions. We may guide and protect and teach as best we can. But they do the becoming themselves.
To hear them speak that night was to understand this all at once, and I was immensely proud of them.
There is another thing I want to say because this note will be read by far more people than could ever have been physically present at the wedding. We have a community that extends well beyond any room we could have hired, and a guest list is, in the end, an administrative document shaped by walls, tables, chairs and capacity. Human relationships are not arranged quite so neatly.
There were people we love who could not be there. There were people who matter to us who were not invited simply because no gathering can contain every relationship accumulated over a lifetime. There were friends, artists, collectors, colleagues and readers whose presence in our lives is real even when they were not present in that particular room. I have thought about that a great deal since the wedding, because one of the things the week made very clear is that community does not begin or end with attendance.
In the days before and after the wedding, messages arrived from everywhere. Cards, emails, flowers, gifts and notes appeared at the gallery and at home. Some were extraordinarily generous, but what moved us most was the thought contained in them. There were ceramics, original artworks, objects with histories, beautiful and useful things, things connected to memory, and things chosen with such understanding that we immediately knew why someone had selected them for us. There were cards whose messages we read more than once, boxes painted by hand, beautiful papers, ribbons, baskets, flowers and all the tiny details that nobody is required to notice but someone had taken the time to think about. Attention is one of the most generous things one person can give another.
A meaningful gift says, in some way, that someone has been paying attention. They remember what you like, what you care about, what you once said, what belongs to your history, what might belong to your future. That is why so many of these gestures affected us well beyond their material value. They carried evidence of care.
Paul and I have been deeply moved by all of it.
And perhaps that is where the wedding finally connects back to the gallery, because our life has always been built this way: through accumulation, participation and other people. A gallery is not made by walls and artworks alone. It is made by artists who trust us, collectors who support them, audiences who come, friends who bring friends, musicians who play, filmmakers who share their work, those of us that carry chairs, install lights, move sculptures, pour wine, stay late, introduce strangers and return again.
Community is built incrementally. One conversation, one introduction, one exhibition, one dinner, one favour, one disagreement survived, one moment of showing up for another person. No single occasion creates it. It accumulates.
Perhaps that is why the wedding affected me so profoundly. For years, we have opened the doors and welcomed other people into the gallery, we have created rooms in which other people could be seen and heard. We have tried to direct attention toward artists, musicians, filmmakers and ideas we believed deserved it. For one evening, the direction reversed. The people we had spent years welcoming came to welcome us into something, the people whose work and lives we had celebrated came to celebrate ours. The community we had tried, in our own small way, to serve turned around and held us.
That is what I hope our marriage becomes: not a retreat into ourselves, but a continuation outward, a commitment to one another and to the life we have already been building together—to our family, to the gallery, to the artists whose work has become part of our lives, to the people who have stood beside us and to the community that has given meaning to so much of what we do.
And so this is, finally, a thank-you. To those who were in the room, and to those who could not be there; to those who wrote, called, sent flowers, mailed a card, brought a gift, helped arrange a table, carried something, fixed something, played music, gave a speech, travelled, wrapped, cooked, poured, waited, worried or simply thought about us: thank you.
You made us feel something I am still not sure I can name properly. It was gratitude, certainly, but also vulnerability, joy, responsibility and the strange realization that the life one has been busy living has quietly accumulated witnesses. People had seen us, remembered us and participated in our lives, and when an important moment arrived, they showed up in every meaning of that phrase.
I married the person I love and understood more clearly than I ever had before that the life Paul and I are building does not belong only to the two of us. It is held within a larger network of people, memory, work, responsibility and affection. That, more than anything else, is what I will remember from the wedding. Not that everything was perfect, or every detail executed according to plan, but that we were surrounded. For one evening, gathered in a room and extending far beyond it, I could see the life we had already made.
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