OIL
Edward Burtynsky

Hardbound, 14½" x 11½", 216 pages
100 color illustrations
2009, Steidl
Editor / Art Director Marcus Schubert
Text by Paul Roth, Michael Mitchell, and William E. Rees

From the Publisher:
Edward Burtynsky’s Oil collects a decades’ worth of photographing the world’s largest oil fields, refineries, freeway interchanges and automobile plants, in an attempt to comprehend the scale of production attending this most politicized of resources. The ideal photographer for this job, Burtynsky locates and documents the sites that urban dwellers never see, and questions human accountability. His imagery is vast in both scale and ambition, revealing the apparatus behind the energy we mine from dwindling resources, and the ongoing effects of the industrial revolution.

“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. It was then that I began the oil project. Over the next ten years I researched and photographed the largest oil fields I could find. I went on to make images of refineries, freeway interchanges, automobile plants and the scrap industry that results from the recycling of cars. Then I began to look at the culture of oil, the motor culture, where masses of people congregate around vehicles, with vehicle events as the main attraction. 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)