06/05/2026 General
NEW YORK, NY—The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has been at work since the early 1980s, his subject no less than the extraordinary ways that mankind has reshaped the planet over the past half-millennium. This era of recasting the world, in which humanity has become a geological force, has been christened the Anthropocene, a term that was proposed as the formal name for the present geological epoch (although that formal designation was rejected by the International Union of Geological Sciences). Burtynsky began his career with studies of the American landscape but quickly graduated to studies of the industrial aspects of the human endeavor, with mines, slag hills, rail-cuts, and other landscape scars bulking large among his imagery in those early years (subjects which still recur). He often shoots from an elevation (often 200 feet or so above the ground), utilizing a helicopter, thereby providing a god's-eye view of the terrain. His work is meticulous, clinical, and often compellingly beautiful, but it is also frequently deeply disturbing.
In 2000 or so, he undertook a series of images of shipbreaking in Bangladesh, the process by which the superannuated vessels of the world's transportation fleets are mined for their parts and metals. The desolate hulls on the foreshore, sliced into sections, resemble nothing less than contemporary sculpture. Burtynsky's images of them are, to my mind, among his most compelling. Typically, his photographs are unpeopled, and these are no exception. Without a human presence for scale, these monoliths could be of any size.
The three images by the artist in the present auction are all from The Martin and Lynn Halbfinger Collection. The first, lot 20, is Stepwell #2, Panna Meena, Amber, Rajasthan, India, 2010. The Escheresque marvel shown here was likely built during the Mughal era in India (though examples of such wells were constructed much earlier), and the delicate stucco yellow of the walls, the many niches and stairways, and the green water in the basin at the foot of the steps are visually inviting (though that water is, in reality, no longer potable). Unlike many of Burtynsky's images, this one is not overpowering but rather is welcoming, retaining something of human scale.
Lot 21, Highway #1, Intersection 105 & 110, Los Angeles, California, 2003 stands in contrast to this. Depicting a traffic junction of almost baffling complexity and scale in South Los Angeles, the cars on its ramps provide scale, and that scale is vast and overpowering. I am certain that I have driven some of its many loops on visits to the city (and probably got hopelessly lost)! This is highway architecture as pop culture; the five-level interchange has featured in movies (the 1994 Speed, where a bus must jump a gap in a ramp, is one). Burtynsky's image is elegant and among his best-known. The calligraphy of the interlocking loops is as graceful as something in the Book of Kells, yet it seems that the artist asks a question of us with the image: what does this vast concrete edifice dedicated to the automobile say of us as a species?
The last of the three lots in the sale by Burtynsky, lot 22, is Rice Terraces #2, Western Yunnan Province, China, 2012. This is a painterly work, or perhaps more accurately; it looks like a composition in stained glass. The terraces stand in relief, in fifty shades of green, and in the center of the terraces, there is a spill of red, both urgent and disquieting. This work is from the photographer's series on water, one of his most extensive efforts to date, to which the Stepwell series also belongs. In these images, he addresses the urgent questions facing an increasingly thirsty planet.
Burtynsky is perhaps the most environmentally engaged of all contemporary photographers. His work speaks to the core concerns that we must have, both as a species and as individuals, in a world that we are changing faster than we ourselves can adapt. He shows us how beautiful that world still is, and his images both enlighten and caution us about the road ahead.
Auction Wednesday, June 10, 2026 at 11am
Exhibition June 6 - 8
View works by Edward Burtynsky from The Martin & Lynn Halbfinger Collection
