Burtynsky Water

Optimized for the retina display, the contents of the fine art book BURTYNSKY - WATER presented in a multi-media rich way on the iPad. This app features 114 colour images along with audio commentary on 57, detailed zooms on 43 and a map exploration showing where images were created. Also included are the videos "Where I Stand" (making of the project 9:41min), the trailer for the film WATERMARK and a tour (to be added in late October 2013) of the BURTYNSKY - WATER exhibition at NOMA guided by Edward Burtynsky.

In Edward Burtynsky's most ambitious project to date, spanning five years to ten different countries, the photographs, the film WATERMARK, the BURTYNSKY - WATER book and this BURTYNSKY - WATER app document the scale and impact of manufacturing and consumption on the world’s water supplies. Burtynsky chronicles the various roles that water plays in modern life – as a source of healthy ecosystems and energy, as a key element in cultural and religious rituals and as a rapidly depleting resource. The photographs, both beautiful and haunting, create a compelling global portrait that illustrates humanity’s past, present and future relationship with the natural world.

“While trying to accommodate the growing needs of an expanding, and very thirsty civilization, we are reshaping the Earth in colossal ways. In this new and powerful role over the planet, we are also capable of engineering our own demise. We have to learn to think more long-term about the consequences of what we are doing, while we are doing it. My hope is that these pictures will stimulate a process of thinking about something essential to our survival; something we often take for granted—until it’s gone.”
— Edward Burtynsky

Edward Burtynsky is known as one of Canada's 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.