Edward Burtynsky: The Great Acceleration

The Great Acceleration
International Center of Photography
June 19–September 28, 2025
New York

The Great Acceleration, Edward Burtynsky’s solo exhibition presently on view at ICP, attracts collectively over eighty pictures revamped greater than forty years. On the museum’s second ground, an array of unusually giant prints reveals landscapes radically altered by industrialized human exercise.

The pictures are pictorially compelling. Their scale and sometimes lyrical composition invite prolonged examination to establish the objects that make for such partaking patterns. Burtynsky has technical mastery that few photographers obtain, and seen from a distance, the photographs have gorgeous readability that holds up even when seen shut. Many had been made with an 8×10 format digicam—a cumbersome setup requiring a tripod and hulking movie holders. This gradual, deliberative course of, now uncommon within the age of digital cameras and telephones, yields pictures of placing definition and element.

Burtynsky’s photos will not be solely technically flawless; they constantly show a powerful formal construction. Even the smaller prints on the third ground maintain their very own. Though they lack the spectacle of the large-scale works, they’re no much less potent. Early in Burtynsky’s profession, prints had been sometimes made at this extra modest scale, and even then they had been unforgettable—like Nickel Tailings #34, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada (1996), a diptych that appears to point out a river snaking throughout two panels, the water an unnaturally vivid orange. Seeing these works once more at ICP, now printed at a lot bigger scale, heightens their formal readability and brings out the feel of the encompassing soil. At this dimension, the abstraction in Burtynsky’s pictures turns into extra pronounced: industrial patterns sweep throughout the floor like parts in an enormous gestural portray.

I discussed this specific work to Marc Mayer, who’s presently writing a biography of Burtynsky, and I used to be astonished when he informed me that “the red rivers aren’t water but nickel mining effluent headed to tailings ponds. They are actually tiny, so an illusion.” These sorts of displacements—of scale, perspective, or abstraction—are among the many qualities I discover most compelling in Burtynsky’s oeuvre.

Documentary images, whether or not journalistic or creative, is subject-driven. A photographer might commit a venture or a lifetime to the examination of comparable topics, occasions, or themes. Depending on the significance, drama, or intrinsic curiosity of the subject material, such pictures may be compelling just by recording what there’s to be seen. Burtynsky’s chosen topics are like this, dramatic in scale and freighted with the existential penalties of the “rise of human impact on our planet.” His materials could possibly be examined successfully in competently made pictures with accompanying textual content, ably fulfilling a pedagogical intent.

The distinction is that Burtynsky’s pictures reveal a definite approach of seeing. His topics are colossal, as are his photos. Subject and movie coalesce into works that unmistakably replicate the sensibilities of their maker. The theme of environmental degradation has been documented in numerous pictures—lots of the similar websites Burtynsky has visited have been photographed earlier than. But few others present the consistency of imaginative and prescient or the formal energy of this artist’s work.