Edward Burtynsky’s work can be seen as a 30-year-long meditation on the prime forces that shape our modern world. Through projects like Oil, Quarries, and Manufactured Landscapes, he’s developed a singular approach to presenting stop-you-in-your-tracks images of the staggering impact of human activity.

Burtynsky and his team are true to form in Water, a jaw-dropping survey in photos and film of the most essential substance to life on Earth.

“There are alternatives to oil,” he says. “There’s electricity in solar and wind, and electric cars. We can begin to do workarounds, albeit not rapidly, but over time we can work around and find alternative energy. But there is no alternative to water. It’s either there or it’s not.”

Whatever the causes, signs are everywhere that our relationship with water is a troubled, even abusive one. The images in Water bring our circumstances into stark relief. Dams in China are redirecting water on a scale that affects the tilt of the planet, while reservoirs in California are drying up and leaving the state in the midst of a massive drought. Many of the great rivers of the world don’t even make it to the ocean for much of the year. Farming remains by far the largest drain on water resources, sucking up between 66 and 90 percent of what’s available.

The images in Water, and its companion film, Watermark, are expansive, colorful, and affecting. Presented in ultra high definition from a wide variety of perspectives, each shot adds a rich brush stroke to the big picture of how we live with water. Sprawling agriculture is seen from an airplane, the Xiluodu Dam from a remote controlled helicopter, ancient Indian stepwells from a pneumatic crane, vast construction sites from the teetering pulleys carrying gravel in and out of the yard. Whatever the perspective, the images somehow speak for themselves – there isn’t much need for commentary.

“If you’re a thinking, feeling human being you’re going to pick up what we’re talking about,” says Burtynsky. “We’re showing you how, in Dhaka, they’re spoiling their water to send leather shoes back to us. I don’t have to tell you that to tell you it’s a problem, because you can see what’s happening to the water, and you can see the chromium laced water is the same stuff that a dad is washing his son’s face with.”

Shooting for Water took place between 2009 and 2010, and out of 60 possible stories the project ended up with 20. Finding the appropriate subjects was difficult – besides the constraints of budgets and logistics, the images had to be both visually interesting and rich in context and content. An early look at Niagara Falls, for example, was ample in the former but lacking in the latter. That footage ended up on the cutting room floor.

The Three Gorges Dam, by contrast, offered the perfect mix of both – a spectacularly massive project that also had some spectacular stats, a 400 square mile reservoir requiring the relocation of over a million people.

“I’m not going to tell you how to think about it, but there are some people that are going to say, ‘Oh my god this is an environmental disaster building a dam like this,’ but others are going to say, ‘Wow this is an amazing engineering achievement, China has now joined the ranks of top dam engineers in the world,' and you can get both readings from the same picture,” he says. “I think when people make their own opinion and meaning from something they own it more, it’s more theirs than somebody telling you. It kind of starts becomnig like a Rorschach test, what you saw says what you think about the world.”

After finishing Oil, Burtynsky was already considering how to tell the story of this other essential fluid. He started with the central pivot irrigation systems that revolutionized agriculture in the U.S., vastly increasing yields and, in turn, the amount of water being used. These images were joined in the book by a variety of others from all over the world – a massive gathering to bathe on the banks of the Ganga river in Allahabad, India, abalone fishers in China’s Fujian waters, the thinning glaciers and parched deltas that bookend our global river systems – each quietly expressing their urgent message.

“What I always want to when I’m framing something up is ask how does it speak to that idea, how does it speak to our relationship with nature, how does it speak to the systems that we’ve employed out here on scale in this place?” Burtynsky says. “I’m constantly trying to figure out how to tackle my next subject and how it fits into these two ideas, both the visualization of it and the subject matter, and what it means in conjunction with everything else I’ve done.”

For Watermark, Burtynsky, director Jennifer Baichwal and cinematographer Nicholas de Pencier included many of the same locations and subjects, but added human voices. A common concept in the film is that people either stand to win or lose in a big way when water starts getting reorganized on a grand scale.

“We just don’t want that as a disembodied idea, we want to take it down to somebody who can actually explain what happened in a very visceral way,” Burtynsky says. “Each one of these things that we’re showing stands in for the larger human activity.”

Burtynsky’s interest in these elemental subjects makes sense. Growing up in Ontario, he was surrounded by a natural beauty that connected the ancient native populations to their land, a landscape that’s long faced threats from mining, quarries, housing, and other modern developments. With all these changes, the role of the landscape photographer has changed too.

“I was no longer to do an Ansel Adams Yosemite, or an Edward Weston kind of reverence,” he says. “As wonderful as nature is and as fun as it is making those pictures – I did those too – I recognized that this was not the landscape of my time anymore, that the landscapes of my time were the ones where we change what was nature in terms of the things that we use. That, to me, was a quantum shift. It was all of a sudden not looking at the landscape.”

Despite the clear problems it presents, the project isn’t a polemic. It's an artistically mediated view the world of water as we’ve shaped it. And ultimately, that makes Water and the rest of Burtynsky's epic works more approachable, more persuasive.

“Rather than kind of chasing the bad actors and celebrating the saints, I just thought why not put water as the central issue and make it the subject,” Burtynsky says. “In the whole environmental debate there’s been a lot of brick throwing and condemnation from one group to another, and I’m not sure how much it’s helped.”

All photos: Edward Burtynsky