The Great Acceleration by Edward Burtynsky
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The Great Acceleration
By Edward Burtynsky
Steidl, 2025
I’ve been reviewing photobooks in these pages for a while now. The Great Acceleration is the most important I’ve come across. In fact, it’s the most important work of any kind I’ve written about since 2023 when I discussed the significance of Gravity’s Rainbow at 50. Pynchon’s book is what I call a “systems novel,” a work that locates characters within cybernetic, environmental, economic, political, and cultural systems. The Great Acceleration is systems photography. As Burtynsky’s cover image suggests, his primary concern is environmental, how humans in the last few decades have accelerated their impact on planet Earth. Although not always recognized as an environmental novel, Gravity’s Rainbow is also most fundamentally an ecological work, one that posits Earth as a “living critter” that humans were created to destroy.
“Be not afraid,” as Prospero says in The Tempest. Gravity’s Rainbow is large and difficult of access. Burtynsky’s trademark photographs are huge and immediately, even shockingly accessible. The book The Great Acceleration does not do—cannot do—justice to the size of the photographs currently exhibited under the same title at New York City’s International Center of Photography where some of the images are ten feet across and five feet high. For Burtynsky, printing photographs at an unconventional spatial scale is one way to communicate temporal acceleration: so much damage in so short a time. To record the scene takes less than a second.
You know—you know you do—how humans have ruined what Pynchon has called the “green uprising” in the Anthropocene. Seeing Burtynsky’s photographs, you will never forget what you know even if you don’t want to remember. That is the importance of The Great Acceleration I claimed above. Unfortunately, the reviewer is not allowed to reproduce some of the best, most unforgettable images. One of my favorites, free at https://www.artworksforchange.org/portfolio/edward-burtynsky/ , is the following, derrick locusts as far as the eye and camera can see:
The exhibition and the book take their title from a work of the same name by the earth scientists J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke -- published by Harvard University Press in 2014. It was in World War II, the authors claim, that the speed of technological power accelerated. Not coincidentally, I think, Pynchon was onto this idea with the centrality of rockets in his novel, rockets moving at such a speed that you heard them only after they exploded. Technological speed required dramatic increases in energy usage, which meant the growth of extraction industries, particularly those in fossil fuel. At the same time, the population of Earth exploded, increasing consumption and pollution—at the points of extraction and at the points of subtraction, where the waste was dumped.
For decades, the Canadian Burtynsky has been traveling the world and publishing books of photographs about individual (but also connected) manifestations of acceleration—in mining, drilling, damning, tailing, building, industrial farming—and about parts of the globe in the forefront of acceleration: China, Africa, North America. The Great Acceleration is like Burtynsky’s Greatest Hits, a synthetic retrospective of his life’s obsessive work--and insistent craft. Though inherently documentary, the photographs are also artful. Easy enough to find examples of human mindlessness, enviroporn. Burtynsky, though, searches out profound representative samples, and then takes great pains to capture the scenes with special large format cameras and with professional ingenuity, using lifts or drones or helicopters to get the right perspective, one that shows the scale and the specifics of the scene. At the exhibition, the viewer can get close enough to see the detail of this strip mine.
Other photographers—Sebastao Salgado, Richard Misrach, Andreas Gursky—have also dramatized with large-scale photographs planetary harm and human suffering. But none has been as fixated on systems as Burtynsky. Misrach’s recent Cargo, wide images of cargo ships in San Francisco Bay, is disturbing but also beautiful. Burtynsky goes to Bangladesh to photograph the unbeautiful shipbreakers of these cargo vessels when they are reduced to scrap, a procvess that pollutes the sea and beach where they are run aground.
Gursky’s giant photos that I’ve seen in a London exhibition are not documentary but digitally manipulated—photoshopped--abstractions, “real” scenes into which tiny “people” are inserted. When Burtynsky wants people in the image, he goes somewhere to find them, not invent them. Here is a Chinese factory where scale is created by extreme repetition.
As in Gravity’s Rainbow, when people appear in a Burtynsky photograph the physical world and economic system in which they exist are not far in the background. In a long, expert (but also at times digressive) essay about Burtynsky’s life and works introducing The Great Acceleration, the photography critic and curator David Campany attempts to balance the issues of abstraction (some photos are barely recognizable as “natural”) and communication, the photos’ political uses. The niceties of Campany’s distinctions will be of interest primarily to academics like Campany. Anyone not tapping a cane who comes face to face with one of Burtynsky’s monsters will understand why the photograph was taken and the system that created the scene.
I used “monster” to emphasize the size and horror of the most affecting photographs in the ICP exhibition and book. Also because the etymology of monster traces back to “warning.” Pynchon wrote about a rocket launched in Europe in 1945 that came down in Los Angeles when Nixon was president. Like Pynchon’s rocket, Burtynsky’s photographs are of the recent past but also warnings of an accelerated future that I won’t live to see but will still name: the Age of Liquidation. All earth will be rare. Substances such as ore will have been turned into liquids and then into manufacture. Liquids such as oil and water will have been turned into air. The profitable global business of human extraction will fail and be liquidated, taking along millions of humans in its fall. The following image of slurry from a nickel mine, one half of a diptych in the exhibition—as if Burtynsky needed to emphasize it—is for me the symbol of this liquidation.
Give The Great Acceleration to your grandchildren and children. Perhaps they will imagine ways to prove me wrong about liquidation.
Tom LeClair is the author of a novel entitled The Liquidators and seven other novels, as well as four books of criticism and hundreds of essays and reviews.