MASSIVE INDUSTRIES OF EXTRACTION- IMAGES

[Orwellian_Ghost]

The new book EDWARD BURTYNSKY - QUARRIES by celebrated Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky traces the artist's in-depth exploration of landscape as transformed by industry—in this case large-scale quarries around the world—works realized over seventeen years within a career that spans over a quarter century. Through masterful technique and often dizzying compositions, the artist presents his magnificent colour images as thought-provoking studies of those deconstructed territories that are created as we dig into the earth for material in order to build our cities. These detailed, sumptuous photographs urge us to consider how we as viewers are simultaneously attracted yet repulsed by these landscapes—somewhere a building is created while a landscape is being destroyed.



"The concept of the landscape as architecture has become, for me, an act of imagination. I remember looking at buildings made of stone, and thinking, there has to be an interesting landscape somewhere out there, because these stones had to have been taken out of the quarry one block at a time. I had never seen a dimensional quarry, but I envisioned an inverted cubed architecture on the side of a hill. I went in search of it, and when I had it on my ground glass I knew that I had arrived."



Burtynsky takes us around the world. We journey to Canada, Italy, China, Spain, Portugal, India and the United States in the search for breathtaking examples of those landscapes created by the massive technologies of extraction.



http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/index.html

[Orwellian_Ghost]

1. Wow. Devastating.

[annabanana]

2. Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.... . . n/t

[Adsos Letter]

3. Very interesting!

over the last 40 years I have watched as the Basalt quarry in Napa has literally made a mountain disappear...tracking my life in tandem with landscape modification.

[FlyingSquirrel]

4. Ditto and here's a fifth rec

[alfredo]

5. In Kentucky and West Virginia it is mountaintop removal

[countryjake]

6. Bingham Canyon copper mine, biggest man-made hole on earth...

In Utah




Botticelli's Chart of Hell

[Ghost Dog]

7. Terrible beauty.

Transporting bags of dirt in the Serra Pelada gold mine. Each worker makes up to sixty trips daily from the bottom of the mine to the sediment dump on top. Brazil, 1986. - http://www.terra.com.br/sebastiaosalgado/