Is there a boundary between the environments we create and the ones shaped by nature beyond us? Are we part of everything else, woven into the fabric of nature, or something separate and distinct?
De rerum natura — Latin for “The nature of things” or “The things of nature” — the first photography book by Áron Tóth-Heyn, is born from these very questions. Focusing on the silent dialogue between living beings and inanimate matter, this intuitively captured collection explores the boundaries between what we label as natural and artificial, rethinking humanity’s role within this continuum.
It adopts a materialist vision of the world in which human beings are simply a collectively interpretable, thinking phenomenon — not exceptions to nature but expressions of it. In its perspective there is only one environment, a unified whole in which everything, including ourselves and our creations, emerges as a natural part or consequence. Áron Tóth-Heyn’s work is deeply connected to the tensions of the Anthropocene and Technocene eras, offering an original contribution that casts new light on the idea of “human nature”, on what it means to be human in an age where nature and artifice are endlessly entwined.
The book’s ternary structure and symbolism also pay tribute to Michelangelo Pistoletto’s concept of the Third Paradise, which imagines a harmonious fusion of nature and artifice. It begins observing the encounter between living and non-living forms, in wilderness — in places seemingly untouched by our presence, in a world without the human factor — where stone, plant, and animal trace a world that exists beyond us. The second movement of the book highlights how humans act as a conscious counterforce to this so-called “natural world,” reshaping the inanimate and reorganizing unconscious life systems to meet our needs. It also explores the paradox of how, having distanced — or even excluded — ourselves from nature, we now strive to recreate it in artificial forms, tailored to our own image. Finally, Áron Tóth-Heyn’s images embrace the fusion of what we define as natural and artificial, suggesting that artificial things are merely natural products of evolution — no different in essence from anything else, born of the same pulse.
Rendered in monochrome, with stark and meditative compositions, De rerum natura is less a documentation than a kind of visual poetry, a manifesto. With its quiet intensity, it offers no answers — only traces, fragments, echoes — that draw us into a deeper awareness: that we are, perhaps, nothing more than a force among forces, reshaping matter as we pass through it, part of nature’s great reconfiguration.
Océane Seyer
Áron Tóth-Heyn created two versions of the book, both printed on a semi-wooden, semi-recycled paper stock. One edition features a cover made from cardboard crafted from the same material. For the other, he grew a mycelium-based biocomposite (mushroom material) to form the cover, producing two unique copies in this form. The symbol of the Third Paradise was laser-engraved on all covers. The books were bound using an open binding technique: black thread for the cardboard version, and thread matching the paper colour for the mycelium editions. The book consists of 192 pages and contains over 140 images. The two with mushroom covers were made as special editions, while the one with the cardboard cover was designed for future production.
Furthermore, he applied emulsion on the surface of the mushrooms and created analog prints on the biocomposite