Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in the photographic work of Edward Burtynsky. His subjects include recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries. The quarries include those in Australia, and these are places that are outside of our normal experience:

Though Burtynsky's large-scale photographs of ‘manufactured landscapes’ – quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines, dams---are of civilization’s materials and debris, Burtynsky represents them in a way that people describe as “stunning” or “beautiful". A forbidden pleasure--attraction and repulsion.

Burtynsky's work lacks the raw anger and the muckraking impulse of the documentary photographer. With Burtynsky's work there is a sense of the awesomeness of a process beyond human comprehension, a sublimity in the industrial mastery, and domination of nature.

There is almost a Romantic quest for the monumental as expressed in Burtynsky images of the Carrara Marble Quarries and the Kennecott Copper Mine, where the earth has been cubed and hollowed out into epic amphitheatres. Burtynsky video of him talking about his work at the 2005 TED Prize. The talk includes examples of the work, which raises questions about sustainable living in industrial capitalism.