The Great Acceleration
International Center of Photography
June 19–September 28, 2025
New York
The Great Acceleration, Edward Burtynsky’s solo exhibition currently on view at ICP, draws together over eighty photographs made over more than forty years. On the museum’s second floor, an array of unusually large prints shows landscapes radically altered by industrialized human activity.
The photographs are pictorially compelling. Their scale and often lyrical composition invite extended examination to identify the objects that make for such engaging patterns. Burtynsky has technical mastery that few photographers achieve, and seen from a distance, the images have stunning clarity that holds up even when viewed close. Many were made with an 8×10 format camera—a cumbersome setup requiring a tripod and bulky film holders. This slow, deliberative process, now rare in the age of digital cameras and phones, yields photographs of striking definition and detail.
Burtynsky’s images are not only technically flawless; they consistently demonstrate a strong formal structure. Even the smaller prints on the third floor hold their own. Though they lack the spectacle of the large-scale works, they are no less potent. Early in Burtynsky’s career, prints were typically made at this more modest scale, and even then they were unforgettable—like Nickel Tailings #34, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada (1996), a diptych that seems to show a river snaking across two panels, the water an unnaturally vivid orange. Seeing these works again at ICP, now printed at much larger scale, heightens their formal clarity and brings out the texture of the surrounding soil. At this size, the abstraction in Burtynsky’s photographs becomes more pronounced: industrial patterns sweep across the surface like elements in a vast gestural painting.
I mentioned this particular work to Marc Mayer, who is currently writing a biography of Burtynsky, and I was astonished when he told me that “the red rivers aren’t water but nickel mining effluent headed to tailings ponds. They are actually tiny, so an illusion.” These kinds of displacements—of scale, perspective, or abstraction—are among the qualities I find most compelling in Burtynsky’s oeuvre.
Documentary photography, whether journalistic or artistic, is subject-driven. A photographer may devote a project or a lifetime to the examination of similar subjects, events, or themes. Depending on the importance, drama, or intrinsic interest of the subject matter, such photographs can be compelling simply by recording what there is to be seen. Burtynsky’s chosen subjects are like this, dramatic in scale and freighted with the existential consequences of the “rise of human impact on our planet.” His material could be examined effectively in competently made photographs with accompanying text, ably fulfilling a pedagogical intent.
The difference is that Burtynsky’s photographs reveal a distinct way of seeing. His subjects are colossal, as are his images. Subject and picture coalesce into works that unmistakably reflect the sensibilities of their maker. The theme of environmental degradation has been documented in countless photographs—many of the same sites Burtynsky has visited have been photographed before. But few others show the consistency of vision or the formal power of this artist’s work.