Burtynsky photographs landscapes that highlight the scale of human industry and consumption.
“My work does become a kind of lament....We can't have our cities, we can't have our cars, we can't have our jets without creating wastelands. For every act of creation there is an act of destruction. Take the skyscrapper—there is an equivalent void in nature: quarries, mines."1
1Diane Ackerman, The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2014), 24.