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PUBLISHER
Steidl

BOOK FORMAT
Slip, clth, 16.5 x 13.25 in. / 64 pgs / 33 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 2/2/2021
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2021 p. 21

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783958298699 TRADE
List Price: $125.00 CAD $175.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock

TERRITORY
NA ONLY

THE FALL 2025 ARTBOOK | D.A.P. CATALOG

Preview our FALL 2025 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.

Edward Burtynsky: Natural Order

Text by Edward Burtynsky.

Nature thrives as humankind pauses: Burtynsky’s ode to the dynamic cusp of winter and spring

In spring 2020 Edward Burtynsky (born 1955) found himself, like most of us, in lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time Burtynsky was in his beloved Grey County, Ontario—an area of wild beauty where he made his earliest photos—and he used his isolation there to reflect and create: with a new camera in hand he began recording nature in images which, in his words, are an “affirmation of the complexity, wonder and resilience of the natural order in all things.”

Over the past 40 years Burtynsky has compellingly explored the shocking variety and scale of industrialized landscapes, from oil refineries to quarries, from aquaculture to salt extraction. Yet in Natural Order he captures a moment when humankind has been temporarily stopped in its tracks, businesses suspended and economies disrupted—a moment for nature to breathe. These photos of trees and other flora show nature on the dynamic cusp between winter and spring, a time of melting snow, sprouting shoots and the promise of bounty: for Burtynsky, “an enduring order that remains intact regardless of our own human fate.”

Featured image is reproduced from 'Edward Burtynsky: Natural Order'.

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

Wall Street Journal

Last year, early in the pandemic, Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky was isolating in rural Ontario, where he’s long owned a place. Over the course of those uncertain weeks, he photographed the transition, as he describes it, “from the frigid sleep of winter to the fecund urgency of spring.” Compiled into a monograph, titled Natural Order, the images show the earth continuing on its path even as human activity slowed to a standstill.

On the Seawall

Mark Athitakis

These photos, he writes, were “made during the time of year when the cycle of renewal exerts itself on the earth,” [...] 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.