Earth’s Poet of Scale

If there was one absence in Burtynsky’s account of our time, however, it was the single greatest result of all that mining, burning, and consuming: the transformation of the atmosphere. Nothing else comes close in scale to the chemical disruption of the air—the flood of CO2 now rapidly overheating the Earth and producing a series of changes so titanic they dwarf even the forces that these photos depict. But carbon dioxide is invisible, which is a problem for photographers.

That’s why in some ways the most remarkable image in the whole show is the most recent, taken too late even to be included in the catalogue. Hanging next to the I.C.P.’s cash registers, and perhaps easily missed as you buy your ticket, the image is an aerial view of the damage from January’s Palisades Fire in Los Angeles. In the photograph’s pinprick sharpness, the few big houses that survive stand out on the fringe of hills at the edge of town. “These were monster homes,” Burtynsky told me, and, indeed, the Palisades blaze is one of the first examples of climate change coming straight for the rich as well as for the poor. The photograph was taken six weeks after the conflagration, and you can see the first lots being cleared of rubble, and the cars flowing by again, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the gargantuan drama Burtynsky has spent his career depicting is here nearing its end.