wants associated with his large-format photographs of breathtaking industrial landscapes. Nevertheless, the Canadian photographer has been accused of aestheticising disaster. For almost 40 years, Burtynsky’s unsettling work has taken a bird’s-eye-view on how industry is spectacularly transforming nature, and our world. His interest, he insists, is not in capturing some terrible beauty, but rather, documenting reality in a visually compelling way.
“I feel that the sublime is now us dwarfed by our own technological advancements,” says Burtynsky, whose body of work continues to grow in tandem with the increasing magnitude of his subject matter. Previous projects such ashave been singular investigations into great processes of extraction, which are shaping and reshaping the Earth’s surface in the name of human need. His latest project has been four years in the making and is his most ambitious yet.