edward burtynsky maps four decades of earth’s industrial systems in new york exhibition

‘The Great Acceleration’ shows at ICP

Edward Burtynsky’s retrospective The Great Acceleration is currently on view at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. Presented across two full floors of the museum’s galleries on Ludlow Street, the exhibition assembles over seventy photographs alongside three ultra high-resolution murals and a visual timeline tracing the artist’s four-decade career.

Organized by ICP’s Creative Director David Campany, the show marks Burtynsky’s first institutional solo exhibition in New York in more than twenty years. It brings together a wide range of material, including both rarely seen portraits and globally recognized landscape images, some of which are being exhibited for the first time.

Edward Burtynsky, The Great Acceleration, ICP, installation view | image © Daniel Terna

edward burtynsky explores human-altered landscapes

The title Edward Burtynsky: The Great Acceleration refers to the intensified pace of global human activity since the mid-20th century, particularly as it relates to climate, resource extraction, and industrial production. The photographer’s images track these dynamics with precision, capturing expansive mining pits in North America, oil infrastructure in Azerbaijan, and agricultural terraces in China, among others. His aerial compositions create a distance from which viewers can comprehend the full extent of altered terrain, while recurring themes such as fossil fuel dependency, industrial labor, and mass waste form a connective tissue across the works.

What emerges is a cumulative portrait of transformation, showing landscapes reshaped by ambition and exhaustion. The images on view across the ICP gallery rarely depict a single event. Instead, they offer visual evidence of systemic forces and long-term change.

Edward Burtynsky, The Great Acceleration, ICP, installation view | image © Daniel Terna

photographic approach and scale

Edward Burtynsky’s large-format prints shown throughout The Great Acceleration reinforce the monumental scale of their subjects. Their clarity and formal construction invite sustained attention, while the sheer size of the images creates an immersive experience within the gallery. The exhibition includes several mural-scale works that stretch across entire walls, offering a panoramic confrontation with their content.

These works share a heightened sense of surface detail and spatial rhythm. Roads cut into mountainsides, shipping containers tessellate across ports, and irrigation systems radiate outward in carefully measured arcs. Rather than romanticize or condemn, his framing positions the viewer within the complexity of global infrastructure.

Although Burtynsky is widely known for his elevated and often remote vantage points, The Great Acceleration also features close-range photographs that focus on the people embedded in these industrial ecosystems. Portraits of workers in factories, mines, and shipbreaking yards provide an essential human counterpoint. They foreground the individuals who shape, and are shaped by, the economies reflected in the photographer’s wider images.

Edward Burtynsky, Oil Fields #19a & #19b, Belridge, California, USA 2003 | image © Daniel Terna

Edward Burtynsky, The Great Acceleration, ICP, installation view | image © Daniel Terna

Edward Burtynsky, The Great Acceleration, ICP, installation view | image © Daniel Terna

Edward Burtynsky, Salt River Pima and Maricopa Indian Community / Suburb, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, 2011

project info:

exhibition title: The Great Acceleration

artist: Edward Burtynsky | @edwardburtynsky

gallery: International Center of Photography (ICP) | @icp

location: 84 Ludlow Street, New York

on view: June 19th — September 28th, 2025

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