Photo by Jim Panou
Toronto?s Yonge Dundas Square is usually a canyon of advertising. But in a commission for this June?s Luminato festival, photographer Ed Burtynsky transformed the 22 screens in the square into a canvas for an immersive media piece entitled In the Wake of Progress.
Drawing on footage from Burtynsky?s 40 years of photography and film projects, the 20-minute wordless piece traces humanity?s fall from Eden: moving from old growth forests to lands swept barren by clear cuts, and thence to suburbs, skyscrapers, and slums. Burtynsky?s iconic images of mountain-deep Carrera marble quarries, post-industrial shipbreakers, and blood red copper tailing pools make an appearance, the latter set to an especially ominous passage of chanting in the cinematic soundtrack by Phil Strong. Photo by Robert Leslie
?The whole idea was born out of wanting to create a feedback loop for Yonge Dundas Square as the epicentre of consumer capitalism in Canada,? says Burtynsky. ?We?re familiar with shopping for high-end fashion and with glass, concrete, and steel, but we don?t know where that glass comes from, or where the clothes are made, or where the waste goes. To make the world we know, there?s a whole other world needed?and it?s the scary one that can come from behind and get us.?
Photo by Alanna Joanne Smith
That shadow world is most poignant in the human images that opened the film Manufactured Landscapes, which also appear around the square: warehouses packed with Chinese facto...