Edward Burtynsky: The Great Acceleration

International Center of Photography, New York, June 19 - September 28, 2025

The Great Acceleration, the first solo institutional exhibition of world renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky’s work in New York City in over twenty years, reveals the depth of his investigation into the human alteration of natural landscapes around the world, showing their present fragility and enduring beauty in equal measure.

“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.” – Bill McKibben, The New Yorker

Curated by David Campany, Creative Director at ICP, this retrospective exhibition presents over seventy photographs, including many of Burtynsky’s landmark images, and some of which have never previously been shown, along with three ultra high-resolution murals. The exhibition also includes a visual and narrative timeline of Burtynsky’s creative life. Intentionally scheduled to extend through Climate Week NYC in September 2025, The Great Acceleration will serve not only as an urgent call for action, but will also give visitors the opportunity to appreciate the sublimity that remains in the landscape, while also deepening our understanding of the challenges that confront us today. In this way, The Great Acceleration upholds ICP’s long-standing and core commitment to present concerned photography that can inspire new audiences.

“The Great Acceleration” is an established term used to describe the rapid rise of human impact on our planet according to a range of measures, among them population growth, water usage, transportation, greenhouse gas emissions, resource extraction and food production, each of which Burtynsky has photographed the outward signs of at length and in great detail over the past forty years. From open pit mines across North America to oil derricks in Azerbaijan, from rice terraces in China to oil bunkering in Nigeria, Burtynsky has travelled across the world and back again as part of his restless and seemingly inexhaustible drive to discover the ways, both old and new, that organized human activity has transformed the natural world. Though already unified by both the precision and formal beauty that Burtynsky deploys to create each photograph, The Great Accelerationfurther underscores that, like their respective subjects, each project remains fundamentally interconnected.