Edward Burtynsky: Essential Elements

Edward Burtynsky (b. 1955) is one of a generation of photographers, including Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, who seek to portray the visible outcomes of a globalized economy and humankind’s impact upon environments around the world. He has achieved global recognition with his large-scale photographs and project-based monographs, such as Quarries , Oil and Water , all of which have resulted in popular touring exhibitions and, in the case of Water , a feature-length documentary film entitled Watermark . However, while Burtynsky’s global standing is without question, no comprehensive retrospective of his career to date exists.

Edited and curated by William A. Ewing, Edward Burtynsky: Essential Elements provides an overview of Burtynsky’s work across four decades, including both iconic images and previously unpublished photographs. It dissolves previous project-based definitions to set out Burtynsky’s oeuvre as five free-flowing sections that provide a sense of both his visual language and his exploration of the dilemmas at the heart of our globalized world. Each of the five sections is interleaved with a selection of texts from previous publications and articles on Burtynsky that work in concert with the photographs to provide a complete understanding of Burtynsky’s view of the world.

. Title: Essential Elements
Publisher: Thames and Hudson, 2016
Author: William A. Ewing, Joshua Schuster
Photographer: Edward Burtynsky
Graphic Design: -
Format: Hardcover
Size: 34 x 28.2 cm, 202 pages
ISBN: 9780500544617
Edition: -