Edward Burtynsky

Edward Burtynsky’s work is an extended meditation on labor, land, beauty, and violence. The extraction of natural resources and the exploitation of human labor have transformed (and often enough, insulted) our shared planetary home. Burtynsky travels the globe photographing such sites of intensive industry—from quarries and nickel tailings in North America, to scenes shipbreaking off the coast of Bangladesh, to his more recent work in China, the epicenter of global industrial expansion. Burtynsky is a master photo-colorist, and his large-format images mix beauty and terror in a unique and powerful way. Art is testimony, and Burtynsky is testifying, eloquently, to the world we live in. He makes us see.