Edward Burtynsky Nickel Tailings, Vale Tailings #3, Sudbury, Ontario, 2025

This image, taken in Sudbury, Ontario, shows a return to a site that produced some of  Edward Burtynsky's most well-known early works and will, together with the images taken in Western Australia, be part of Burtynsky's ongoing Mining: For the Future project.

In new works from Sudbury, Burtynsky turns his lens to the vast tailings ponds of Vale's Copper Cliff Central Tailings Area (CTA), a 2,430-hectare landscape that stands as both artefact and active site of transformation. Once emblematic of the environmental costs of large-scale nickel extraction, Sudbury has, over the past several decades, undergone one of the most ambitious ecological recoveries in industrial history. Today, Vale's operations are frequently cited as a global benchmark for sustainable mining-not as a matter of rhetoric, but as the result of continued investment in land rehabilitation, emissions reduction, and technological innovation.

Here, Burtynsky finds a terrain that challenges conventional notions of waste: tailings are no longer treated as inert byproducts, but as sites of ongoing intervention, where circular economy principles and biological reclamation strategies are now reshaping the land. From an aerial perspective, these environments reveal a complex and evolving topography-at once abstract and deeply material-inviting viewers to observe the legacy and future of resource extraction in an era defined by urgent environmental reckoning amidst a global energy paradigm shift.