Water Edward Burtynsky

* RARE Water continues Burtynsky's investigation into our continually compromised environment. Weaving together the various roles that it plays in everyday life, Burtynsky has undertaken an ambitious representation of water's increasingly fragmented life cycle. Often from an aerial perspective, the photographs take on a unique abstraction and painterly quality. Many of the images focus our attention not on water itself, but on the systems that humans have put in place in order to harness, shape and commodify it. Water follows the format of previous projects such as Oil, China and Quarries in it's encyclopaedic exploration of a broad theme through a series of connected chapters or locations. Both beautiful and haunting Burtynsky's Water creates a compelling global portrait that illustrates humanity's past, present and future relationship with the natural world and its most vital and rapidly depleting resource.