Edward Burtynsky's remarkable photographic depictions of large-scale industrial landscapes are included in the collections of over 60 major museums including the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Burtynsky's distinctions include the TED Prize, the Outreach Award at the Rencontres d'Arles and the Roloff Beny Book Award. He sits on the board of directors for the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival and the Ryerson Gallery and Research Center, and is co-founder of the Scotiabank Photography Award. In 2006 Burtynsky was made Officer of the Order of Canada and in 2016 he received the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts. Burtynsky holds seven honorary doctoral degrees. His books with Steidl are China (2005), Quarries (2007), Oil (2009), Water (2013), Salt Pans (2016) and Anthropocene (2018).
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.-- Wall Street Journal