People are asking me now, "What is your book about?" There is no snappy answer to set the record straight... It concerns how one slowly breathes in the perspective of an artist, in this case, a photographer. It took me a bit of time to assemble the reality of how my mistakes taught me. Another aspect was keeping me in tune with artistic inclination, or thinking like an artist. These elements were in no hurry to get my attention, either. It came to me that hurrying these inner guides were only going to irritate them. If that happened, one or more of these voices would just evaporate; they weren't really using words and paragraphs anyway. I introduced a focus to the whole mix... The surface of the lake was my subject, which entailed needing a constant awareness of light conditions, wind, and colors around the edges of the lake and out on the water at most times of the day. People on the shore asked, "Why are you taking photographs of the water?" So, as the New England summers melted into foliage fests, the shape and mixture of colors on the surface of this large, gangly pond brought my attention to the possibilities of mixing light, color, and the unexpected conditions suitable for capturing abstract shapes. Much of my learning hinged around a grumbly pontoon boat and its wakes. These were watery tails which liked the interplay of colors from a gaudy sunset. It was my job to make a decent record of how the sky colors refreshed into watercolors, as the waves left temporary troughs behind for my adolescent efforts at creating water art.

Gathers photographs of watertowers in the U.S., Great Britain, Germany, and France and describes the authors approach to industrial photography

"This book explores humanity's increasingly stressed relationship with the world's most vital natural resource in a series of photographs made by Canadian artist, Edward Burtynsky. Over the past five years, Burtynsky has travelled across the globe, from the Gulf of Mexico to the shores of the Ganges, while weaving together an ambitious representation of water's ever more fragmented lifecycle. In colourful 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 rituals, 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, dried river regions and ominously-coloured salt and shrimp farms. Many of these photographs are Burtynzky's most abstract images yet; pivot irrigation plots are carefully crafted into totemic arrangements of geometry and dryland farming fields are transformed into dizzying collections of biomorphic 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 relationship with the natural world."--Book jacket.