Böcker av Edward Burtynsky

Published on the occasion of Edward Burtynsky¿s largest and most comprehensive exhibition to date, at the Saatchi Gallery, London, Extraction / Abstraction looks deeply at the key subjects and signature images spanning his 45-year career. Alongside Burtynsky¿s compelling photographs, the book includes texts by celebrated art historian Simon Schama, who examines Burtynsky¿s work in light of the question ¿Can art help save the world?¿, and by curator Marc Mayer, former director of the National Gallery of Canada, who provides an overview of the photographer¿s achievements as technician, journalist and artist.Extraction / Abstraction presents a dichotomy of Burtynsky¿s image-making imperative: the lucid and informed documentation of large-scale extractive processes, and how he transforms the landscapes of industry into complete abstractions. Other essential themes in his oeuvre such as agriculture, manufacturing, infrastructure and waste also find their rightful place here. With more than 130 color plates, the book furthermore has a special section, the ¿Process Archive,¿ featuring previously unpublished, behind-the-scenes photographs of Burtynsky at work on the ground and in the air throughout his career. The archive provides a glimpse into the artist¿s progression through the evolution of the medium itself, from mid twentieth-century large-format analogue (film-based) cameras, through to twenty-first-century high-resolution digital technologies, including explorations into photogrammetry and augmented reality.

In spring 2020 Edward Burtynsky found himself, like most of us, in lockdown due to the corona pandemic. At the time Burtynsky was in his beloved Grey County, Ontario-an area of wild beauty where he made his earliest photos-and he used his isolation there to reflect and create: with a new camera in hand he began recording nature in images which, in his words, are an "affirmation of the complexity, wonder and resilience of the natural order in all things."Over the past 40 years Burtynsky has compellingly explored the shocking variety and scale of industrialized landscapes, from oil refineries to quarries, from aquaculture to salt extraction. Yet in Natural Order he captures a moment when mankind has been temporarily stopped in its tracks, businesses suspended and economies disrupted-a moment for nature to breathe. These photos of trees and other flora show nature on the dynamic cusp between winter and spring, a time of melting snow, sprouting shoots and the promise of bounty: for Burtynsky, "an enduring order that remains intact regardless of our own human fate."