Edward Burtynsky's photographic exploration of industrialization in China gets a new design and reissue after 20 years
This is a new, redesigned edition of Edward Burtynsky's (born 1955) China from 2005, one of the first books by the Canadian photographer known for his contemplative work on nature and human existence. In images both arresting and unsettling, Burtynsky gave visual form to the immense economic and social transformation that China was undergoing at the start of the century. He gained rare access to both remnant and new zones of industrialization, including the Three Gorges Dam, vast sites of steel and coal production, the shipyards of Qili port in Zhejiang, as well as fading manufacturing complexes in the northeast. Burtynsky's lens penetrated entire villages dedicated to recycling economic waste, where painstaking sorting work still takes place by hand; seemingly endless factory floors; and high-density cities that have displaced an older, more graceful world. Burtynsky's original book was both a documentation and premonition of change; now, two decades later, his work affirms the wide-reaching and questionable results of that change, both in China and beyond.
