Overview
In October 2009, a decade-long survey of Edward Burtynsky's photographic imagery exploring the subject of oil opened at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, the inaugural venue in a tour of the exhibition across Canada, the United States and Europe. This epic body of work - encompassing depictions of the architecture of massive refineries, labyrinthine highway interchanges, abandoned drills presiding over former oil fields in Azerbaijan, monumental tankers made skeletal and strange in the shipbreaking yards of Bangladesh - weaves together multiple visual threads in a cautionary tale of our destructive dependency on this contested energy source.
