Burtynsky’s landscapes depict pattern and extraction logic, not the sublime.

Evidence

Critics constantly label these immensities “sublime,” though that’s surely misappraisal: they are highly composed and highly studied, making pattern and order their subjects, always evoking the underlying logic of capitalist extraction in its all-too-cognizable concretude. And they are beautiful: pleasurably coordinating the sensuous appreciation of daring construction, of all that could be built if we dared toward more. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 331