Edward Bertinsky Pictures: “Natural Order.” Revision. – culture

County Gray is a vast, rolling stock country in the Canadian province of Ontario. It’s close enough to Toronto to feel almost populated on the weekends. But it’s far enough north to make way for the wilderness. Photographer Edward Bertinsky moved there in March 2020. He wanted to prepare for a big trip to Africa, for an expedition like the one he had already undertaken to document the extent to which the world was subject to industrial production concerns.

The trip came to nothing, the city became a dangerous place because of the plague, and Edward Bertinsky remained in Gray County. However, he did take pictures. But he is no longer interested in the quarries, highway junctions and container ports that he has become famous for recently. Instead, he went to the nearby forest and thus to a nature that no one had ever touched before. He painted this wild growth not from above, in the way he usually depicted landscapes, with the help of a drone, crane or helicopter, but from the front: a person stands before the forest, but even a hunter will not find a way inside.

It was only in the nineteenth century that art left the world organized by capital

Historically, landscapes heralded a self-referential system. This also applies to physical terms: they often document the rule or property. Such was the case in Italian painting in the Renaissance when people began to look at their surroundings to discover themselves. The instrument of this thinking was the central perspective. So it was in the Dutch landscape of the seventeenth century, when the painter’s gaze wandered over fields, pastures, and reclaimed lands, as if it were a matter of registering a land.

It wasn’t until the early nineteenth century, with the Romantics, that art left the world organized by capital. At that time, in the form of the “Arctic Ocean”, for example, as painted by Caspar David Friedrich, it turned into natural spaces in which there is no place for man, or what is the same: art sought to open up spaces in which there is no other story than Frequent change of seasons. In “Natural Order,” a series of about thirty photographs that Edward Bertinsky took in the Gray County wilderness last spring, the photographer reproduces this transition under even more extreme conditions. For the mountains and seas of romantics must appear so wonderful that people feel small in comparison. It is not intended at all in wood.

Even the smallest branch appears in a great depth of field

It seems that there are few tall trees in this area. May the cold winter take care of that, as it cuts through from the north, from Hudson Bay, into the vicinity of the Great Lakes. It is clear, however, that the intermixing of lower plants, climbing plants, shrubs, shrubs, lichens and ferns is more intense. The forest here is a huge interior space that does not allow entry and presents itself as a deep confusion, the word “deep” is understood in a double sense, in the moral and spatial sense. The photos were taken between the last snow and the first green, removing any noise from the foliage.

Felt was photographed with a Danish ultra-high-resolution camera, the “first stage”, which allows to expand the depth of field in single steps (“focus”). Even the smallest twig, the thinnest stalk, stands out clearly, regardless of whether it is at a distance of one meter or thirty meters, and with all the nuances of shape and color: Edward Bertinsky, speaking about the “quarter tones” of the color scheme, can map with this technique – or is it It is better to say: create? – able. In addition, some of these images give the impression that the Canadian Forest has secretly partnered with Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism.