The Great Acceleration gathers forty years of Edward Burtynsky's landmark landscape photography into a retrospective that maps the full scale of human industry on Earth — from open pit mines to oil bunkering — with equal attention to fragility and formal beauty.
About This Book
The term "Great Acceleration" describes the exponential rise of human impact on natural systems — population growth, resource extraction, greenhouse gas emissions, water usage, food production, transportation — and Burtynsky has spent four decades photographing its physical evidence. This retrospective brings together landmark images alongside previously unpublished work to construct an interconnected portrait of a planet transformed by organised human activity. Shot across continents — North American mines, Azerbaijani oil derricks, Chinese rice terraces, Nigerian oil bunkering sites — the photographs insist on the coexistence of sublimity and crisis. It is both a document of environmental photography at its most rigorous and an urgent prompt for reflection on contemporary responsibility.
Key Features
- 136 pages of large-format colour photography, including previously unpublished images
- Text by David Campany
- Published by Steidl, ISBN: 9783969994818
What You'll Discover
- How Burtynsky constructs formal beauty from industrial-scale landscape alteration — making the sublime and the catastrophic inseparable
- The visual grammar of the Great Acceleration across sites as varied as North American open pit mines, Azerbaijani oil fields, and Nigerian bunkering operations
- The thematic interconnection between each of Burtynsky's distinct project bodies, underscored here by their presentation as a unified retrospective
- How documentary photography can function as both aesthetic practice and environmental argument without sacrificing precision in either register
About the Author
[Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 136
- Dimensions: 235 x 305 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783969994818
- Publisher: Steidl
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Photographers, architects, and designers engaged with landscape, ecology, and the built environment; academics working in environmental humanities or visual culture; collectors of serious documentary photography.