“The scale is just insane,” photographer Garth Lenz says of the industrialization he photographs in the province of Alberta. Lenz was drawn to the area because of the dramatic changes in the landscape that accompanied the development of the oil sands there and the visual variety it created.

“Some of the tailings ponds are up to 9,000 acres, about two-thirds the size of Manhattan,” he explains. And it’s impossible to show that scale without using aerial photography, a process that Lenz had to adapt to as he began playing with abstraction in his landscape work, which focuses on the extraction and consumption of resources. “Certainly, for the first number of years that I did aerial photography, I didn’t enjoy the process