Natural Order #33, Grey County, Ontario, Canada, Spring, 2020

Even for Ontarians deeply familiar with such ecosystems, the image has an uncanny quality that resists ordinary perception. The effect is the result of photographic technique. The naked eye cannot apprehend multiple depths within the dense sapling thicket at once—especially when a sunlit foreground casts the background into shadow. Instead, vision shifts incrementally, as the eye refocuses from one plane to another, each successive layer obscuring the rest. Burtynsky’s use of sharp focus in this work collapses the natural visual adjustments made by the eye into a single, continuous field. While sharp focus has always been a feature of his work, in Natural Order Burtynsky pushes it to the point where technique becomes indistinguishable from his subject.

Like the human eye, cameras can only keep part of a scene in sharp focus at one time. Photographers can extend this range by using a smaller aperture and longer exposure, but even then, movement—such as a slight breeze through the saplings—can cause blur. Burtynsky addresses this limitation using a digital process known as focus stacking, in which multiple images taken at different focal depths are combined into a single, uniformly sharp picture. The result is an image that presents more visual information than we could perceive in a single glance. We aren’t used to seeing nature this way, except perhaps in paintings, where the artist’s goal is to maintain clarity throughout.

Here, Burtynsky applies to the natural landscape the same photogenic qualities of computer-assisted sharp focus he first explored in industrial settings. He resists conventional depth-of-field effects, just as he resists other stylistic and interpretive techniques common to his medium—directed lighting, backlighting, leading lines, etc.—avoiding attracting attention to the role of the artist. Such formal interventions would risk upsetting the balance his work maintains between beauty and unease; such images would lose their force if the viewer senses manipulation.

Considered within the broader scope of Burtynsky’s project, and across its thematic, material, technical and social dimensions, this subtle work points to a central contradiction: the industries that photography relies on to help us see nature more deeply are harming it, and, by extension, us. Paradox and irony are braided in this subtly elegiac work to form a hermeneutic depth of field, a simultaneous exposure of subject, object, and implication.