This remarkable book of Burtynsky's photos is published in conjunction with his major exhibition at the Saachi Gallery in London. It's a celebration of his forty-five years of capturing the work of man on the world's surface and below it. The 107 whole-page photos (in the Plates pages) have five chapters: Abstraction; Agriculture; Extraction; Manufacturing and Infrastructure; Waste. These capture, mostly with aerial shots, the unusual beauty of industry and food production.
Burtynsky's somehow finds and takes eye-catching shots, for example, looking down on the abstraction of dry farming in Arago, Spain, and perhaps the ultimate abstraction in the book is the photo from above of the Thjorsa River in Iceland, a mix of blues, greys and blacks (it's hard to believe it isn't an abstract painting). In Yunnan Province, China, a sea of canola stretches to the horizon but is punctured by small hills.
The Manufacturing pages equally provide dramatic photos, a spread wide shot from the Boeing fuselage assembly plant shows seven of their 373 jets under construction and the BMW assembly plant in Pretoria, South Africa, in one picture, shows a few dozen orange-painted robots putting parts together. The caption makes an interesting point that the country has more than thirty percent unemployment.
A really nice feature about the book are the extensive captions for everything in the Plate pages. The back of the book has several photos of Burtynsky and staff on location in several countries and bang up to date he's shown working with a camera fixed to a drone. Mixed in with these photos there's an interesting timeline of his career using large thumbnails and text for the twenty-four commissions, starting in 1978 through to 2023. Steild has published some of these and this latest book of Burtynsky's work shows what a world-class photographer he is.
US
Edward Burtynsky Extraction/Abstraction /anglais: BURTYNSKY EDWARD: 9783969993132: Amazon.com: Books
UK
