They are beautiful pictures of sometimes hideous places. The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky's views of large industrial quarries round the world can be read in many different ways - as monumental landscape photographs, environmental reportage, a form of highly emotive autobiography . . . Whichever way you choose to receive them, they are magisterial.

Together, they become encyclopaedic. Filled with detailed interest, these are also pictures that contain big ideas, about archaeology, architecture, the nature of labour, man's effect on his surroundings and our surroundings' effect on us. Burtynsky's pictures take their place alongside those of such important conscientious commentators as the great Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado or Richard Misrach, who has spent a lifetime chronicling the beautiful despoilation of the landscapes of the American West.