Excitedly chatting with Ed Burtynsky about his most expansive retrospective to date, it is hard to comprehend what we are about to walk into. With 94 large-format photographs, 13 high-resolution murals, and an augmented reality encounter, this exhibition promises a journey beyond the ordinary.

As always though, I’m distracted. My mind is half here and half on the kid at home for half term and half on work pinging my phone incessantly, crying out for attention.

Entering the Saatchi Gallery there is no time to acclimatise. In the calm, warm glow of the carefully chosen lighting, I’m immediately engulfed by the colossal images that command my attention. Everything else recedes. The bustle of London and my everyday life now seem small, almost silly, minute. I become so lost in the detail of the vast murals that it feels like I might tip over and tumble inside.

Burtynsky’s ability to render the ordinary extraordinary is striking. I spend at least 20 minutes zooming about the first room searching each photograph from every angle, trying to understand how he has made sand look soft and velvety and yet sharp and dangerous. His lens turns our deserts into hot, alien, treacherous seas. How could these possibly be of our world? My world? The planet I live on?

The image which grabbed and turned me upside down like a magic eye poster, is the memorably named ‘Uralkali Potash Mine #4’. Captured in a vast maze of abandoned mining tunnels 250 metres below Berezinki, Russia. The Whorls carved into the walls look purposeful, created by an installation artist or an act of photoshop trickery. But is actually the aftermath left behind by the drilling for potash.

I oscillate between admiration for their beauty and shame as a voyeur of the wounds they show in such detail. A wondrous planet plagued by petulant, uncaring parasites. Who mine the flesh and plunge into the depths of their own home, an attempt to satisfy an unending hunger and greed for more. More oil, more minerals, more salt, more, more, more. And yet…those scars, the marks we leave behind are hypnotizing, beautiful. A quote echoes in my mind, becoming louder and stronger until I find myself almost chanting it as I move between the pieces “they are felling trees! Good trees!’

The clear California sun beaming down upon exposed fields filled with nodding donkeys instead of treets in “Oil Fields 19a and 19b”. A modern day diptych of worship and faith. This stirs memories of my family’s tangential connection to mining and I go searching for Berkeley Pit, the Anaconda Copper Mine, in Butte. Then left feeling strangely forlorn it isn’t here, grasping for a connection to or understanding of, this destruction.

As the exhibition progresses, industry and humanity are explored more prominently. The world shown is becoming less alien and more tangible as the planet I inhabit, yet they become colder too. Involuntarily resisting these, I’m drawn back down through the gallery to the vast, incomprehensible images that give me vertigo.

There, it’s as if I have tumbled into a Tolkien or Frank Herbert novel of another universe. Or even wondered on onto Endor! I take refuge with In The Wake of Progress. I cannot or do not want to deal with the cold cruel reality of Extraction upstairs, I would rather be lost in the mind-bending and all consuming Abstraction.

In “EXTRACTION / ABSTRACTION,” Edward Burtynsky takes us on a visual odyssey that transcends photography. It’s not just an exhibition; it’s an immersive experience that beckons you to confront the tangled web of human ambition and consequence. It is damn good photography and heart breaking art.

Burtynsky: Extraction/ Abstraction, a retrospective of the photographer’s work, is at Saatchi Gallery, London SW3, from Feb 14 to May 6; Edward Burtynsky — New Works is at Flowers Gallery, London W1, from Feb 28 to Apr 6