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Until the appearance of drones, world watchers had few opportunities to lift their points of view from the ground and contemplate the Earth, in all its breadth, from above. The rareness of this kind of approach to reality, at a scale very different from that through which we normally perceive and experience, makes it extremely attractive. Moreover, the change of perceptive scale has implications on our awareness as observers, and this has been coined as the ‘overview effect.’ Such cognitive shift in scale of perception was first described by astronauts on voyage to outer space, from which they discerned our planet as a small and fragile sphere. Similarly, but without need to leave Earth, Edward Burtynsky’s photographs transcend their own beauty in transporting us to a loftier plane of reflection, one which coincides, too, with the concerns of our times. Edward Burtynsky (St. Catharines, Ontario, 1955) has for almost four decades now been taking pictures of the industrial landscapes that characterize out relationship with the environment, capturing the raw and cold beauty that underlies humanity’s interaction with nature. His most emblematic photos – aerial shots of mines, railway tracks, infrastructures, dams, assembly lines, and so on – also produce the ‘overview effect’ that serves to illustrate in the observer’s mind the new geological era in which the planet is immersed, the Anthropocene.
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