Burtynsky: Oil

“Shocking with beauty.” — The Washington Post
“The definitive photographic documentation of this hotly debated subject.”—Paul Roth

Edward Burtynsky has traveled internationally to chronicle the production, distribution, and use of the most critical fuel of our time. This new, interactive edition of his monumental OIL project surveys a decade of photographic work on the subject and features new work from the Gulf of Mexico.

This app features more than 100 of Burtynsky’s stunning photographs, including ten images from a new series documenting the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Each image is seen full-screen in high-resolution, and each can be expanded to zoom into detail.

Burtynsky provides audio commentary on twenty-four of his photographs, describing how he made them, what they show, and how they fit into his narrative on oil. The app also features video walkthroughs of the OIL exhibition with the artist himself.

Edward Burtynsky is known as one of Canadas most respected photographers. His remarkable photographic depictions of global industrial landscapes are included in the collections of over fifty major museums around the world, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California.

“In 1997 I had what I refer to as my oil epiphany. It occurred to me that the vast, human-altered landscapes that I pursued and photographed for over twenty years were only made possible by the discovery of oil and the mechanical advantage of the internal combustion engine...These images can be seen as notations by one artist contemplating the world as it is made possible through this vital energy resource and the cumulative effects of industrial evolution.”— Edward Burtynsky