Edward Burtynsky’s latest book, Natural Order, collects a series of landscape photos he shot on his property in rural Ontario during the pandemic lockdown of the spring of 2020. The elements of the images are simple: leafless trees, reeds, grasses, water. In that regard, the photos represent a return to first principles for Burtynsky, who started his career in the late 1970s and early 80s shooting similar landscapes. Back then, he was interested in nature, but in a painterly, compositional way. The photos were tributes to the geometry of nature with no overarching message beyond that. He was still figuring out his direction.
Between then and now, he’s figured out that direction. Famously so: In the ensuing decades he’s become one of the world’s best-known photographers of humanity’s epic reshaping of the earth. Across various thematic collections — spotlighted most notably in Jennifer Baichwal’s 2006 documentary, “Manufactured Landscapes” — he’s produced wide-format photos of shipbreaking, shipbuilding, mass factories, gobstoppingly epic public-works projects like China’s Three Gorges Dam, and commerce-choked American byways. In 2018, he launched a project called “Anthropocene,” but the title could apply to just about all his work.
Burtynsky became a success due to (or perhaps in spite of) the fact that his photos are disarmingly poker-faced. The same image can be read as a tribute to human engineering (Oh, look what we’ve done!) or evidence of our bottomless capacity to consume, mine, and drill (Oh, look what we’ve done!). In his talks and in documentaries like “Manufactured Landscapes,” Burtynsky emphasizes that what he’s documenting is the rapacious exploitation of resources. But the cranes and deep-focus setups he uses to get his shots wouldn’t be strictly necessary if exploitation was all he sought to expose. He doesn’t chronicle consequences so much as processes; humanity is often absent in his photos, and rarely captured up close. The emotion he chiefly trades in is awe.
What do we do with that sense of awe? Artist’s notes tell us what we’re looking at in a Burtynsky image: damage. But we’re also guided to appreciate, if not admire, the scope and audacity of human effort. So if we’re awed by a Burtynsky photo, we’re implicated in a human, at times inhumane, urge to use resources. Burtynsky has mastered the generation of this frisson of anxiety so well that his work has become something of a cliche. He’s the Andy Warhol of bien pensant concerns about the environment. Quarries, mines, rigs; lather, rinse, repeat. Geoff Dyer once expressed “the suspicion that Burtynsky is photographing the crisis of peak oil and climate change like someone fluently producing company reports.” It’s not a joke: Scan through the annual reports of Freeport-McMoran, one of the United States’ biggest mining companies, and you’ll find plenty of Burtynsky-esque images. One man’s photograph of trashing the earth is another man’s snapshot of its literal treasure.
Natural Order suggests that being forced to stay close to home offered Burtynsky the opportunity to shift not just tactics but themes. The collection strips out the queasy, ambivalent feeling his work often generates. Here, he documents no exploitation, and the awe he means to inspire is of a very different type. These photos, he writes, were “made during the time of year when the cycle of renewal exerts itself on the earth,” and the images are meant to suggest that nature has used lockdowns to reassert its ability to beat humanity at its own game. Natural Order emphasizes the order part: he has selected photographs of trees whose branches curve and tangle to resemble neural networks, or are strikingly perpendicular to their trunks, evoking street grids. We can see each tendril of grass and branch in detail, but the colors generally coalesce into a uniform reddish-gray.
So we’re not just talking about springtime renewal here; the grayness also signals a certain precarity. We could be looking at a landscape that is finally preparing to regenerate itself after a long winter, or that hasn’t survived it. A wind-shaped pile of gray-brown hay is curled and leaning forward, like a comic-book creature rising from the earth, or perhaps thawed out after winter froze it dead in its tracks. But the ledger is slightly in favor of survival: In the collection’s final image, a streak of vivid green grass rises from the water, splitting the otherwise gray image. Nature is reclaiming not just the earth but a well-worn metaphor for economic recovery: green shoots.
Our sense of awe here is less complicated: nature, left to its own devices, is a force for good. Burtynsky’s talent for deep focus makes these images both lush and immersive, even if what he’s photographing isn’t precisely verdant. We want to track how long these branches stretch, how deep the forest goes. In the same way he guides our eyes to go deep into the process of widget-making and strip mining, Burtynsky wants us to inhabit these natural processes.
Which isn’t the same thing as inhabiting nature. In his introduction to the book, Burtynsky writes that the images in the collection are meant to be an “affirmation of the complexity, wonder and resilience of the natural order in all things.” This is nature as a function of humanity; a nature of patterns, of a kind of intelligence. It’s nature as a rival to humanity. Shot during lockdown, the images capture a moment when we hit the pause button and nature had a brief opportunity to better compete with us. And as that moment passes, Natural Order will likely be a brief and peculiar detour in Burtynsky’s oeuvre. Soon enough, human industry will be back to business as usual. Most likely, so will Burtynsky.
[Published by Steidl on February 2, 2021, 64 page, $125 hardcover]
Photos: © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery and Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, New York / Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto
