BIRD'S EYE VIEW
Monumental Landscapes Tell Stories of Change
Story by Katherine Fawcett | Images by Joern Rohde
On display in the Audain Art Museum’s Upper Galleries until Sept. 15, these large-format images capture the raw beauty and rich detail of glaciers, peaks, crevasses, and crags across the Tantalus Range, Mount Waddington Glacier, and The Black Tusk, among others. Photographed from a helicopter, the compositions are so dizzyingly clear they make the air around them feel thin. Look closely, and you’ll see hikers and mountaineers exploring the landscapes. So tiny when set among the mighty peaks, the people remind us of the insignificance of humans in the context of the mountains.
Yet these aren’t sentimental wilderness portraits — Burtynsky’s images are meditations on geologic time and impermanence. The subtext is clear: these glaciers are retreating. They, like so much of the natural world, are in flux.
“Most of Western Canada’s glaciers will be lost to melting within the next 80 years,” Burtynsky writes. “By the end of this century, they might all be gone.”
Edward Burtynsky, left, Audain Art Museum Dr. Curtis Collins Director & Chief Curator
The show is curated by AAM’s Director and Chief Curator, Dr. Curtis Collins, and presented in partnership with the 2025 Capture Photography Festival. It positions Burtynsky not just as a documentarian of damage but as a chronicler of loss. His Coast Mountains are neither untouched wilderness nor devastated wastelands — they’re beautiful, vulnerable, and suspended in a state of anxious transience.
We live and play here. We drive the Sea to Sky Highway and pull over to take pictures of the jaw-dropping vistas. We enjoy hiking, biking and skiing in these awe-inspiring mountains. But Burtynsky’s unique photographs ask us to truly appreciate our rugged environment without filters and in a fresh context. For locals and mountain lovers alike, The Coast Mountains is a stunning chance to see the familiar made strange — and fleeting — through the lens of one of Canada’s master image-makers.