The Great Acceleration<\/p>\n
By Edward Burtynsky<\/p>\n
Steidl, 2025<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been reviewing photobooks in these pages for a while now.\u00a0 The Great Acceleration is the most important I\u2019ve come across.\u00a0 In fact, it\u2019s the most important work of any kind I\u2019ve written about since 2023 when I discussed the significance of Gravity\u2019s Rainbow at 50.\u00a0 Pynchon\u2019s book is what I call a \u201csystems novel,\u201d a work that locates characters within cybernetic, environmental, economic, political, and cultural systems.\u00a0 The Great Acceleration is systems photography.\u00a0 As Burtynsky\u2019s cover image suggests, his primary concern is environmental, how humans in the last few decades have accelerated their impact on planet Earth. \u00a0Although not always recognized as an environmental novel, Gravity\u2019s Rainbow is also most fundamentally an ecological work, one that posits Earth as a \u201cliving critter\u201d that humans were created to destroy.<\/p>\n
\u201cBe not afraid,\u201d as Prospero says in The Tempest.\u00a0 Gravity\u2019s Rainbow is large and difficult of access.\u00a0 Burtynsky\u2019s trademark photographs are huge and immediately, even shockingly accessible.\u00a0 The book The Great Acceleration does not do\u2014cannot do\u2014justice to the size of the photographs currently exhibited under the same title at New York City\u2019s International Center of Photography where some of the images are ten feet across and five feet high.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
You know\u2014you know you do\u2014how humans have ruined what Pynchon has called the \u201cgreen uprising\u201d in the Anthropocene.\u00a0 Seeing Burtynsky\u2019s photographs, you will never forget what you know even if you don\u2019t want to remember.\u00a0 That is the importance of The Great Acceleration I claimed above. \u00a0\u00a0Unfortunately, the reviewer is not allowed to reproduce some of the best, most unforgettable images.\u00a0 One of my favorites, free at https:\/\/www.artworksforchange.org\/portfolio\/edward-burtynsky\/<\/a> , is the following, derrick locusts as far as the eye and camera can see:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Great Acceleration By Edward Burtynsky Steidl, 2025 \u00a0 I\u2019ve been reviewing photobooks in these pages for a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":46741,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-46740","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46740\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}