The third release in TPG’s 50th Anniversary Golden Editions series is this dramatic image by the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky (b.1955 in St Catharines, Ontario, Canada).

The epic scale and chiaroscuro lighting effects at play emphasise the cavernous sea-shell like interior of this working mine, while focusing the eye on the industry at its centre. It continues Burtynsky’s artistic and political investigations into what he calls the ‘indelible human signature’ on the planet.

The epic scale and chiaroscuro lighting effects at play emphasise the cavernous sea-shell like interior of this working mine, while focusing the eye on the industry at its centre. It continues Burtynsky’s artistic and political investigations into what he calls the ‘indelible human signature’ on the planet.

Edward Burtynsky is regarded as one of the world's most accomplished contemporary photographers – although as his practice has expanded to incorporate a range of media, he prefers to describe himself as a lens-based visual artist. His images have an extraordinarily painterly quality, rich in form and texture, focused on capturing the symbolic rather than photographic reality of his ‘landscapes’ which encompass industrial arenas such as quarries, mines, landfills and man-made waterways. He returns again and again to these terrains, his lens accentuating their majesty, while exposing the sustained and collective depletion of natural resources by humans.

In 2012, Edward Burtynsky’s series Oil, which chronicled the effect of this resource on all our lives, revealing the rarely seen mechanics of its production and distribution, was presented as the opening exhibition at The Photographers’ gallery new home in Ramillies St, W1. Burtynsky stated, "I was honoured to have been given the inaugural exhibition at the newly renovated Gallery. TPG remains as one of London's most important destinations for the dissemination of photography in all its forms."

His latest series Anthropocene (launched in 2018) forms part of a wider collaborative project chronicling the massive and irreversible impact of such cannibalisation of the Earth. At its centre is the scientific belief that we have altered the planet to such an extent that we have entered a new geological time scale.