But since 2012, Burtynsky has tried to dedicate time each year to photographing “pristine landscapes,” capturing images of nature that inspire something more like hope. Earlier this year, he traveled to Shark Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site at Australia’s farthest-western point. The bay is famous for the stromatolites studding its shore, layered rock structures formed over thousands of years by microorganisms that grow, die, and calcify with sediment into marine mushroom caps. Stromatolites are considered the oldest-known fossils on the planet, a living record; some in Shark Bay would have witnessed a time before humans invented the tire—or the wheel. Burtynsky viewed the stromatolites and the rest of Shark Bay’s coastline only from the air, angling his camera out of the passenger window of a Cessna 210. The ground, he left untouched.