Ed Burtynsky is excited to talk about the Black Tusk.
We’re at the end of a walk-and-talk with the celebrated Canadian photo-artist for the opening of his new exhibit at the Audain Art Museum. On until Sept. 15 and part of the 2025 Capture Photography Festival, The Coast Mountains: Recent Works by Edward Burtynsky occupies the Audain’s signature upper gallery space. Introduced a few minutes prior by Audain director Curtis Collins, Burtynsky has led us past six other massive, wall-shrinking images while sharing thoughts on his favoured large-format cameras, the process of capturing such shots by helicopter, the post-production need to deal with haze from wildfire smoke, and how the works juxtapose the pristine grandeur of B.C.’s mountains with glacier retreat due to climate change.
Now, fronting the space’s large terminal window, a sun-soaked day of exuberant spring green-up contrasting the moody gunmetal skies, bleak rock and rotting ice of the imagery, Collins segues Burtynsky’s final address with a story of returning from an event in Vancouver the previous day and detouring off Highway 99 to show him Alexander Falls, knowing the return trip down the Callaghan Valley would be revelatory.
“I was hoping it would be like seeing an old friend, because Black Tusk is visible all the way back,” beams Collins. “And Ed was like, Wow. So now he’s going to tell you what you see if you look closely at his image of it.”
As the Sea to Sky’s brand darling and centrepiece of the Fire & Ice Aspiring GeoRegion, Black Tusk has a history of being revelatory, and, even if this image is void of the ice melt depicted in the others, having direct relation to the region’s glacial heritage. Originally believed to be the erosion-revealed plug of an ancient stratovolcano, the Tusk has been reinterpreted, based on rock type and cooling patterns, as lava injected directly from below into the two-kilometre-thick Cordilleran ice sheet that periodically blanketed Whistler during the Pleistocene. “We flew around it a couple of times before I decided there was one iconic view that had this drama to it. So we hovered in that pocket for a while as I shot,” says Burtynsky. “I could see people on it—which I was excited about—but didn’t realize how many; I’m sure there are over 30. You actually don’t even see them until you stare at it for a while and then they just start to appear.”
Closing in, you see what he means. That this spire, so wild and stark from a distance of even a few metres, is actually braided with trails and bristling with hikers. It goes to the heart of what Burtynsky intended as an artist since he began capturing landscapes with a four-by-five camera back in the late-’70s—conceiving the primary viewer experience as big, museum-scale prints, and that seeing these photos in a book, magazine, phone or computer are all secondary experiences. This approach allows viewers to assess the composition from a distance, get the feel and drama of a first-impression. “Then I’m kind of inviting you to go for a deep dive into the detail and [make] other discoveries about the work that you can’t get without being in its presence,” he says. “It’s a body experience: You walk into the scene, you walk away. It’s not something static. And at the same time, it’s all looking towards nature.”
Nature is where Burtynsky’s journey started, he acknowledges, noting that if he didn’t love nature he couldn’t do this kind of work. “We’re privileged in Canada—especially B.C.—to have a window on what nature intended,” he says.
This differs fundamentally from the manicured natural areas of Europe which are rife with human intention—a palimpsest over the kind of nature-lost-to-human-will that otherwise features prominently in his other work. He reflects on an early assignment to shoot “Evidence of Man” when he was studying photography at Toronto’s Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University). “It was like being given a hall pass to be an observer of our species. My thinking was, ‘If there was another intelligent species in the universe, what would I show them so they could understand what we’re doing?’”
Artists typically have a reference point, and Burtynsky’s is deeply geological, his ongoing inquiry into how we humans have modified or scarified the Earth’s surface at scale—depicting the largest mines, tailings piles, quarries, dams and other projects. Though his breakout work in the 1980s and 1990s deftly addressed this theme, it really came to the international fore with 2003’s Manufactured Landscapes, a series of images conveying, among other things, the result of Western consumerism on the industrialization of China and the environmental devastation caused by these ambitions. A subsequent documentary film showed how the grandeur of Burtynsky’s images is often in tension with the compromised environments they depict. Considering the myriad crises caused and faced by humanity, explorations of our ever-expanding footprint and the substantial ways this is reshaping the planet’s surface have landed very much on the existential nose, winning him the 2005 TED Prize and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2016.
This ethos is very much continued in the current exhibit. “The Coast Mountains are one of the last remaining areas of extensive glaciation at this elevation and latitude. And they’re disappearing quickly,” he says. “I’m not telling anybody something they don’t already know. But this is a kind of a record, a kind of a contemplation of the fact that they’re with us still,” he says.
Coming on the heels of the Whistler Institute’s presentation, “Melting Glaciers, Healthy Watersheds & You,” the Audain’s Burtynsky exhibition brings into sharp focus a picture that all who dwell in the Sea to Sky have been staring at for decades. “Estimates are that most of Western Canada’s glaciers will be lost to melting within the next 80 years. By the end of this century, they could all be gone,” Burtynsky reflects. “My daughters, who are in their 20s, will not be looking at the same world when they are my age. These images are a reminder of what’s being lost—relics of ancient ice and an essential resource for ecosystems and freshwater in these parts of the world.”
This makes the seven images on display in the Audain the epitome of purpose: they are at once grandiose, muscular, and worrisome. In other words, transformational in a way that can both inform and inspire to action. “I don’t call myself an environmentalist,” Burtynsky had noted in his introduction. “I work to be revelatory, not accusatory.”
Leslie Anthony is a Whistler-based author, editor, biologist and bon vivant who has never met a mountain he didn’t like.
