Edward Burtynsky: Water

January 11, 2025 - June 22, 2025

Over the course of five years, Canadian Edward Burtynsky (b. 1955) traveled across the globe, from the Gulf of Mexico to the shore of the Ganges, while weaving together an ambitious representation of water’s ever more fragmented lifecycle. In colorful aerial images, many bordering on the edge of complete abstraction, Burtynsky traces 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 ritual, and as a rapidly depleting resource. 

Many of the  images focus our attention not on water itself but on the systems that humans have put in place in order to harness it, shape it, and control it. Photographs of maze-like stepwells in India, massive dam construction and aquaculture in China, manufactured waterfront housing projects in Florida and irrigation systems in the American West are presented alongside parched landscapes, fried river regions, and ominously-colored salt and shrimp farms. Many of these photographs are Burtynsky’s most abstract images; pivot irrigation plots are carefully crafted into totemic arrangement of geometry and dryland farming fields are transformed into dizzying collections of biometric forms. These images, sometimes elegant, sometimes haunting, hover between the worlds of painting and photography, forming a compelling global portrait of water that functions as an open-ended question about humanity’s past, present, and future relationships with the natural world. 

Edward Burtynsky: Water was organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Edward Burtynsky

Edward Burtynsky is a renowned Canadian photographer known for his large-scale images of industrial landscapes, which powerfully depict humanity's impact on the environment. His work captures the intersections of nature and industry—focusing on sites such as quarries, mines, oil fields, and manufacturing plants. Through his lens, he presents hauntingly beautiful, yet unsettling, images that reveal the environmental toll of modern industry. Burtynsky’s striking compositions highlight the scale and complexity of human intervention in the natural world, encouraging viewers to consider the consequences of consumption and resource extraction. His work has received international acclaim, and he has exhibited in prestigious venues like the Guggenheim and MoMA. Burtynsky’s projects, such as Water and Anthropocene, are widely regarded as urgent commentaries on global ecological issues.

Upcoming Programs

Support Comes From

This exhibition project is presented by the Minnesota Marine Art Museum, a nonprofit mission-driven art museum located on the shores of the Upper Mississippi River. MMAM gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from generous contributions from foundations, corporations, individuals, members and volunteers.