43 Quotes by Edward Burtynsky

I have a fondness for when the landscape becomes surreal.

Good governance takes behavior that is negative or not helpful to the greater good of society, whether it's polluting behaviour, plastics, or whatever, and taxes the behaviour.

In our ephemeral information age, people think we've left behind the stone, bronze, and iron ages. But they're all still going on - we use tonnes of this stuff every day. You just have to look.

Wherever you disrupt water from its natural cycle, there's always a winner and a loser. Whoever is the one it's directed towards is the winner, and whoever loses that water is the loser.

I no longer see my world as delineated by countries with borders or language, but as seven billion humans living off a single, finite planet.

In film, you can create the illusion of time and space. People speak; characters reveal their feelings. You can use music, which informs how you should be feeling, and it carries you to the right emotional space.

These landscapes aren't breaking news or necessarily even illegal. These are intentional, purposeful landscapes, whether to extend our cities or build a mine or put a road in or clear a forest. I've been photographing that which has been intended by us; it's not an accident.

My father was an amateur oil painter, so some of his oil paintings were on our walls. There was one above the piano of a famous Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko, playing an instrument known as a bandura. I remember that one kind of resonated with me; it was always central in the living room.

One thing that's consistent in all of my work is that these aren't accidents; they're all conscious landscapes. They're all things that we're doing and that we have done through our legal and social systems and structures of capitalism.