Edward Burtynsky revisits nature's innocence in new collection

Edward Burtynsky revisits nature’s innocence in new collection

Photographer Profiles

February 6, 2021 ·

Mark Mann

The pandemic-era restrictions on travel and social interactions have prompted everyone to adapt, not least photographers, who can’t work from home as easily as some. After all, to take pictures, you need subjects, and the living room has its limits.

Thankfully, parks and forests have made the cut for essential service, and we are still allowed to visit the great outdoors. No doubt this new condition is converting many to nature photography who would otherwise point their lenses elsewhere. Following Orson Welles’s dictum that “The enemy of art is the absence of limitation,” it may be said that exploring one’s local bio-region makes for a livelier creative constraint than hibernating at home.

Just ask Edward Burtynsky. Finding himself in lockdown this past spring, Canada’s celebrated documentarian of human nature and “our collective stranglehold on the natural world” has turned his focus again to the real thing, pure and simple. Taken during walks near his home on the Bruce Peninsula in Grey County, Ontario, this latest series of photos have been collected in a new book titled Natural Order, released by Steidl in February 2021.

*Natural Order #27, Grey County, Ontario, Canada, Spring 2020*
photos © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto / Flowers Gallery, London

In this series, humans and their devastating earthworks have left the frame, as have any foregrounded subjects. Following his love of pattern and abstraction, Burtynsky’s compositions operate like highly-textured colour-field paintings, all drizzled over with shoots, branches and tendrils — Rothko meets Pollock. Which is a way of saying that they look like nature as we are accustomed to finding it: not dramatically staged but abundantly detailed and filled right up to bursting with growth and more growth.

Natural Order offers an affirmation that may help us through the rest of this long winter. Burtynsky shot all these photos in the earliest days of spring, when the chill still lingers but young buds and shoots are starting to appear. The images reverberate with the Earth’s mantra of seasonal change. This too shall pass, and the next thing, and the thing after that, until we come back around again, and on and on. It’s called Life, and it’s nice to see.

*Natural Order #20, Grey County, Ontario, Canada, Spring 2020*
photos © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto / Flowers Gallery, London

*Natural Order #14, Grey County, Ontario, Canada, Spring 2020*
photos © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto / Flowers Gallery, London

*Natural Order #13, Grey County, Ontario, Canada, Spring 2020*
photos © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto / Flowers Gallery, London

*Natural Order #5, Grey County, Ontario, Canada, Spring 2020*
photos © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto / Flowers Gallery, London

Mark Mann

January 2021

Luminous-Landscape is a membership site. Our website contains over 5300 articles on almost every topic, camera, lens and printer you can imagine. Our membership model is simple, a Dollar-a-Month ($12.00 USD a year). This $12 gains you access to a wealth of information including all our past and future video tutorials on such topics as Lightroom, Capture One, Printing, file management and dozens of interviews and travel videos.

To continue reading with unlimited access join today for $12 a year

New Articles every few days
All original content found nowhere else on the web
No Pop Up Google Sense ads - Our advertisers are photo related
Download/stream video to any device
NEW videos monthly
Top well-known photographer contributors
Posts from industry leaders
Speciality Photography Workshops
Mobile device scalable
Exclusive video interviews
Special vendor offers for members
Hands On Product reviews
FREE - User Forum. One of the most read user forums on the internet
Access to our community Buy and Sell pages; for members only.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Mark Mann

See all articles by Mark Mann

Mark Mann is an award-winning journalist whose feature stories have appeared in Toronto Life, The Walrus, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, Vice, Reader’s Digest, Broadview and Maisonneuve, among others. His writing about contemporary art, dance, film and photography have appeared regularly in Momus, Blouin ARTINFO, The Dance Current, and elsewhere. He is the Associate Editor-in-Chief of BESIDE, a Montreal-based magazine that seeks to bridge the gap between nature and culture.