Editor’s Note: How we got Edward Burtynsky to shoot our cover

Edward Burtynsky is one of this country’s best known, possibly the best known, contemporary artists. His photographs, as he has often said, bear witness to the sometimes ugly trappings of modern life, sitting at the uneasy intersection between our desire for consumption and its terrible impact on the planet. His large-scale works—tailings ponds, scrap heaps and open-pit mines somehow rendered beautiful through his lens—hang in more than 80 museums around the world, including the National Gallery of Canada, the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim and the Tate Modern.

This month, his work appears in our pages, too—and not for the first time. Our long-time photo director, Clare Vander Meersch, first met Burtynsky in the mid-1990s, at Toronto Image Works, the photo lab and darkroom rental facility he opened in 1985 and which became a hub for the city’s photographers, Clare among them. “Long before his work gained international recognition,” she says, “Ed was well known as an early pioneer of environmental landscape photography.”

When Clare joined Report on Business magazine in 2001, she set out to create a distinct visual identity, hiring fine-art photographers to tell business stories. One of her early commissions, in April 2002, was to unleash Burtynsky on the Port of Vancouver for a photo essay called “The Giants”; those photographs would eventually form part of his 2018 multidisciplinary Anthropocene Project. Another assignment had Burtynsky shooting the facility where the Canadarm was being built. As Clare tells it, even though his own brother worked there, he still had trouble getting inside the place—until ROB stepped in. “Not long after that,” she says, “access for him was never a barrier again.”

When Queen’s Park reporter Jeff Gray pitched a story about Ontario Shipyards—an upstart shipbuilder struggling to get in on the current naval procurement binge—Clare remembered that Burtynsky hailed from St. Catharines, Ont., home to one of the company’s three dry-dock facilities. “I thought it was a long shot,” she says, but she asked anyway. Despite having a packed schedule that would take him to South Korea for much of the summer, Burtynsky said yes.

As it turns out, those Port Weller dry docks loomed large in Burtynsky’s childhood. They opened in 1946, nine years before he was born, and as a kid, he remembers riding his bike past the cavernous complex, which at the time was bustling with workers repairing cargo ships. “This was something that was always in my sights,” Burtynsky says, “but I never had a chance to see it.”

Until now.

On a blistering day in July, he and his team went to Port Weller to capture what Ontario Shipyards CEO Sean Padulo hopes is the start of a renaissance for boat-building on the Great Lakes (more specifically on Lake Ontario—not, ahem, Lake America).

You can read all about it—and, of course, admire Burtynsky’s accompanying photography—in ‘Shipping and handling.’