| EDWARD BURTYNSKY, TRANSFORMATION Sept. 13 – Nov 29, 2025 Opening Reception: Saturday, September 13, 2 – 4 pm EXPLORE EXHIBITION Robert Koch Gallery is pleased to announce Edward Burtynsky: Transformation, featuring monumental color photographs that examine landscapes altered by resource extraction, manufacturing, rapid development, and the ecological changes that follow. These works continue Burtynsky’s ongoing exploration of how human intervention has reshaped natural environments worldwide, revealing both their vulnerability and magnificence.The exhibition embodies Burtynsky’s decades-long pursuit of capturing the profound and often permanent changes human industry brings to the earth’s surface. Edward Burtynsky: Transformation opens concurrent to The Great Acceleration, Burtynsky’s exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York, presently on view through September 28, 2025. Timed to coincide with Climate Week NYC in September 2025, this landmark presentation, curated by David Campany, marks Burtynsky’s first major institutional exhibition in New York City in over twenty years. It is accompanied by a monograph by the ICP / Steidl. Each project remains intrinsically linked, showing how local environmental changes reflect broader global patterns, documenting the visible effects on the land brought on by demographic expansion, water consumption, carbon emissions, and mineral extraction. “At such a critical moment in time, I hope this work sparks meaningful dialogue about our relationship with the planet and brings more people to this awareness,” reflects Burtynsky on his mission to document our changing world. Top image: Edward Burtynsky, Dry Tailings #1, Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2024 |
Image scroll above: Edward Burtynsky, (1) Rainforest #2, Olympic National Park, Washington, USA, 2024; (2) Echo Bay #1, Lake Mead, Nevada, USA, 2023; (3) Thjorsá River #3, Southern Region, Iceland, 2012; (4) Coast Mountains #15, Receding Glacier, British Columbia, Canada, 2023 Available | Signed Monograph
Edward Burtynsky
The Great Acceleration
Steidl (1st Edition), 2025
Since Edward Burtynsky’s birth in Ontario, Canada, in 1955, the Earth’s population has roughly tripled, and its economy has grown tenfold. This “great acceleration,” to use the title of the (exquisitely curated and hung) retrospective newly installed at the International Center of Photography, on the Lower East Side, is the most anomalous stretch in human history, and during the past four decades Burtynsky has been almost certainly its greatest visual chronicler—a poet of scale, making use of ever-better lenses and innovations such as drones to gain an ever more encompassing perspective. Perhaps the only photographer to have backed up farther from this subject was Bill Anders, the Apollo 8 astronaut who gave us “Earthrise,” in 1968. But that image was taken from too far away to even hint at the stress that the Earth was undergoing as the human footprint expanded. Burtynsky had the perfect depth of field for the task, and his images have become steadily more complicated over time.
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