"In this book, Edward Burtynsky presents photographs of the remnant and newly established zones of Chinese industrialization - those places created while realizing the "glory" of wealth for a powerful civilization yearning to move forward and join the ranks of modern nations. Using diplomatic channels, Burtynsky has gained rare access to these sites, creating images that are at once arresting and unsettling. These photographs afford us privileged glimpses of the vast social and economic transformation currently underway in China." "Burtynsky casts a watchful eye over the extreme expressions of Chinese industry. His subjects include the Three Gorges Dam, at present the world's largest engineering project and Bao Steel, China's biggest steel producer. He explores the vanishing dinosaurs of old industrial complexes in the north eastern "rust belt" and shipyards at Qiligang, the single most concentrated area of shipbuilding in the country."--BOOK JACKET.

"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.

Anthropocene is the newest book by Edward Burtynsky to document human destruction of the earth on a geological scale. In photos as beautiful as they are disconcerting, Burtynsky explores issues such as extinction (large-scale burning of elephant tusks to disrupt illegal trade and the black market, the plight of the last white rhino), technofossils (Nigerian landfi ll sites entirely of plastic, massive concrete tetrapods to protect Chinese coastline from erosion), and terraforming (mines and industrial agriculture). Conta ining specially commissioned poems by Margaret Atwood published here for the fi rst time, a statement by Burtynsky and a range of essays, Anthropocene presents compelling artistic and scientifi c responses to these urgent topics. The book is one part of the larger "Anthropocene" project, a multi-disciplinary body of work with fi lmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nick de Pencier which includes a major traveling exhibition, documentary fi lm and interactive website. Its starting point is the research of the Anthropocene Working Group, an international body of scientists advocating to change the name of our present geological epoch, Holocene, to Anthropocene--the period where human activity dominates climate and environmental change. Including images of the video components and augmented reality experiences from the exhibition, the book, like the overall project, combines traditional and new lens-based media in an innovative and dynamic expression of humanity's profound and lasting changes on the planet.

The focus of this book is a series of remarkably compelling and incredibly tactile large scale photographs of Australian mine sites taken from the air. From this perspective, through the eye of a master photographer, what are for many scars upon the landscape become extraordinary images of beauty and sensuality. This sumptuous, large format, casebound book also features a series of accessible and insightful essays on Burtynsky's work, on photography and Australian landscape and art.

"A catalogue to accompany the exhibition Anthropocene, a collaboration by the artists and filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky, and Nicholas de Pencier, including film, photography, virtual reality, and augmented reality. Anthropocene is organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Canadian Photography Institute of the National Gallery of Canada, in partnership with Manifattura di Arti, Sperimentazione e Tecnologia (Fondazione MAST)."--

In this provocative and original work, Slavoj _i_ek takes a look at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. From the sinking of the Titanic to Hitchcock’s Rear Window, from the operas of Wagner to science fiction, from Alien to the Jewish Joke, the author’s acute analyses explore the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society. _i_ek takes issue with analysts of the postmodern condition from Habermas to Sloterdijk, showing that the idea of a ‘post-ideological’ world ignores the fact that ‘even if we do not take things seriously, we are still doing them’. Rejecting postmodernism’s unified world of surfaces, he traces a line of thought from Hegel to Althusser and Lacan, in which the human subject is split, divided by a deep antagonism which determines social reality and through which ideology operates. Linking key psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts to social phenomena such as totalitarianism and racism, the book explores the political significance of these fantasies of control. In so doing, The Sublime Object of Ideology represents a powerful contribution to a psychoanalytical theory of ideology, as well as offering persuasive interpretations of a number of contemporary cultural formations.