Burtynsky Water series is down right amazing, especially how he explores humanity's increasingly stressed relationship with the world's most vital natural resource water. The shear size that he uses to present the photos, while still being able to keep such vibrant colors is impeccable. His reason for making these enormous and colorful aerial images was not to bring our attention to water itself, but on the systems that humans have put in place in order to harness, shape, and control it.
From capturing the massive dam construction to the manufactured waterfront housing creates a world of painting and photography. These images some elegant and others haunting form a compelling global portrait of water that functions as an open-ended question about how humanity's past, present, and future relationship with the world. He did a great job of showing the various roles that water plays in our modern society.
I really enjoyed his series on water. My two favorites though were the Control and Waterfront series. His expression of how communities are drawn to coastal regions and waterfront properties really puts in perspective for me how much we as a modern society really rely on use water as so many different things. Burtynsky did a spectacular job expressing that in the control series and how we as human go through great efforts to direct, contain, and harness the power of water. Like the massive construction of the Xiluodu Dam in China. If that dam was never created there would be no reason for a population of people to be there, because their would be no use of the water. We as humans rely on water for almost everything.
I am always torn when I see massive dam projects like Xiluodu - on the one hand, hydroelectric power is fairly clean energy. On the other hand, they're terribly destructive environmentally and can come at major human costs (a New York Times article estimates that 100,000 people will be displaced by the project). And they always silt up, reducing storage capacity and generating power. That said, I thought the photographs were awe-inspiring :)
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