Toronto is in seasonal limbo. Spring officially begins this week, but there’s not a hint of it in sight-no closed buds weighing down trees, nor any sign that crocuses ever bloomed in this town. That’s a tough reality to contend with, considering how months of ice, slush, and grey sky tend to magnify the ugliness of our man-made world otherwise known as The City.

You just can’t admire the way a car or Robarts Library looks covered in snow the way you can adore a pine tree dusted in white. Or can you? Yes, you can, with the help of photographer Edward Burtynsky.

Toronto-based Burtynsky shoots images that take your breath away. But there’s nary a majestic mountain in any of them, unless you count his Oxford Tire Pile series, in which a California tire dump takes shape as a landscape of imposing hills and sharply sloping valleys. Perhaps even more startling are his photographs of nickel tailings in Sudbury: tailings are the remnants of mined minerals, which, if you didn’t know, look like rivers of lava surrounded by pitch black polluted earth.

These are photographs of waste on wasted and ruined land-and they are beautiful.

But Burtynsky’s exploration of the relationship between industry and nature does not end here. There are photographs of American oil fields with their innumerable pumps nodding away, as well as images of broken-down buildings and roads enveloped by shattered concrete, heralding the coming of China’s Three Gorges Dam.

Destruction defines his photos. Even when there are natural elements to be found in his work, they are usually dead. Similar things can be said about Toronto’s depressing wintertime. And yet, Toronto is considered “ugly” as a result.

Perhaps the beauty evoked in Burtynsky’s work is merely the result of manipulation. For example, angles are paramount in photography: from any one direction, a shot can either look spectacular or it can look boring.

But, it would not be fair to solely attribute the image quality to something as simplistic as technique. In fact, technically, Burtynsky’s photographs have a very “bare-bones” feel to them. He doesn’t embellish images by running them through Photoshop, which elevates the subject matter so that you’re not thinking about the fact that you’re staring at a photograph. You’re thinking that you can’t believe these places exist. You want to visit these sites so you can see for yourself just how incredibly stunning everything looks.

So in some respects, what makes it difficult to not be affected by Burtynsky’s work is its industrial landscape subject matter, many of which are nearly just a hop, skip, and a jump away from Toronto, and many of which you could find variations on right here in the city.

Find them now, because these places can disappear just like the forests that preceded them. A few years after Burtynsky shot his Californian tire landscapes, the dump caught on fire; those hills and valleys don’t exist anymore.

Whether you go in spring or winter won’t matter, because these visuals are defined by the absence of things like budding trees and blooming crocuses-which could make getting through this seasonal limbo period a little more aesthetically pleasing for everyone.