Patterns: Art of the Natural World, published by Damiani and released to coincide with Earth Day (April 22, 2026), is a striking photobook by Australian photographer and conservationist Jon McCormack. The project emerged from a pivotal shift in McCormack’s practice during the COVID-19 pandemic, when travel restrictions confined him to a single location and, in turn, fostered a slower, more attentive way of seeing. “Repetition removed distraction. Because I wasn’t constantly moving on to a new destination, I could no longer rely on the excitement of elsewhere. I had to let the subject reveal itself more slowly,” he reflects. The result is a body of work unified by pattern, spanning everything from a bear mid-shake to microscopic studies of rocks and minerals like jasper and quartzite. These unexpected connections across the natural world evoke a sense of childlike wonder. “Something about fossil and rock photography makes me feel as though I’m tapping into my inner child,” McCormack writes. “There’s a joyful sense of curiosity and wonder that comes from closely studying something so simple, yet so extraordinary.”
You’ve been photographing nature for decades. How did COVID-19 and travel
restrictions change the way you both see the world and photograph it?
“COVID changed the scale at which I was paying attention. Before that period, much of
my photographic life was built around movement, travel, fieldwork, and the sense that
the next place might reveal the next image. When the world closed down, that outward
momentum disappeared almost overnight. I was left with a much smaller radius, but in
an unexpected way, that limitation became clarifying.
“I began returning to the same stretch of coast in Northern California again and again. At
first, I approached it as anyone might: wide scenes, sunsets, the obvious landscape
photographs. But repetition has a way of stripping away the easy answers. Once the
obvious pictures were exhausted, I had to look harder. What emerged was a very
different relationship with the natural world. I became less interested in the grand view
and more attentive to the way light moved across water, the way foam gathered around
rocks, and the way tiny changes in tide could completely alter the visual structure of a
scene.
“That period taught me that the world is far more alive, varied, and inventive than we
often allow ourselves to notice. I wasn’t discovering a new place every week, but I was
discovering that the same place is never actually the same. In that sense, COVID
narrowed my geography but expanded my seeing. It pushed me away from novelty and
toward attention, and that shift eventually became foundational to Patterns.”
What specifically do you attribute this shift in perspective to? Was it going to the same
place every day, or taking more time and being more mindful, or something else?
“The daily return to the same place was a big part of it, but I think the deeper shift came
from the combination of repetition, constraint, and time. Repetition removed distraction.
Because I wasn’t constantly moving on to a new destination, I could no longer rely on
the excitement of elsewhere. I had to let the subject reveal itself more slowly.
That naturally led to a more mindful way of working. I began to spend more time waiting
and observing rather than trying to impose an idea onto the scene. The process
became quieter and more deliberate.
“In interviews about the book, that period has been described as almost meditative, and that feels right to me. There was a transition from hunting for pictures to being receptive to them. The pace slowed enough that subtleties began to matter: reflected color, minute shifts in angle, small alignments of form, and the way transient elements like mist or foam could briefly create an entire visual world.
“There was also something psychologically important about being limited. Travel had
always offered me stimulation and possibility, but during lockdown, I couldn’t escape into
movement. That forced a kind of creative honesty. I had to ask not, “Where else can I
go?” but, “What am I missing right here?” And the answer turned out to be a great deal.
“That experience made me realize that wonder does not depend on distance. It depends
on the quality of attention you bring.”
Did the way you edit images or think about stories and projects change as well?
“I don’t edit that much, and that hasn’t changed. However, the way I think about
photography has changed a lot. At the beginning, the work I was making during COVID
was more narrowly conceived, with small, impressionistic landscapes that were almost
variations on a single motif. There was a visual sensibility I liked, but not yet a larger
idea capable of carrying a book. At one point I laid the work out and felt it simply wasn’t
holding together. That was an important moment because it forced me to ask what I
was really trying to photograph.
“What I eventually understood was that the organizing principle wasn’t place at all. It was
pattern. Once that clicked, my subject choice changed from being about category or
subject matter to being about resonance. Aerial photographs, ice caves, microscopic
forms, animal markings, fossils, and shorelines could all speak to one another if they
shared the same structural or rhythmic intelligence. I stopped thinking so much in terms
of “landscape image,” “macro image,” or “microscope image,” and instead thought about
how forms echoed across scale.
“That also changed how I think about storytelling. I’m now more interested in projects
that emerge from a way of seeing than from a checklist of locations or subjects. A
strong body of work, for me, is less about coverage and more about coherence, about
whether the images deepen one another. Patterns became a story not because it
documented one place or one ecosystem, but because it traced a visual language that
appears again and again throughout the natural world.”
Your latest book is called Patterns. What do patterns in nature mean to you personally?
And why dedicate an entire book to them?
“Patterns are one of the clearest ways I experience both the beauty and the intelligence
of the natural world. They are visual evidence that nature is not chaotic in the simplistic
sense we sometimes imagine. Across wildly different scales and subjects, similar
structures keep appearing: spirals, ripples, branching forms, tessellations, waves,
repetitions, symmetries, and fractures. You can find them in coastlines, feathers, fossils,
plants, glaciers, animal coats, mineral structures, and even microscopic life. To me, that
recurrence suggests not sameness, but relationship.
“What moves me personally is that patterns sit at the meeting point of art and process.
They are beautiful, but they are not decorative accidents. They are shaped by pressure,
flow, growth, chemistry, gravity, evolution, wind, water, and time. In other words, they
are the visible traces of forces acting on the world. When I photograph them, I feel I’m not just photographing surface appearance. I’m photographing evidence, signs of how
life and matter organize themselves.
“That is why a whole book felt necessary. I didn’t want pattern to be a side note in a
larger collection of nature photographs. I wanted it to be the central idea, because it is
one of the deepest unifying threads I know. The book page describes these images as
revealing the recurring geometries and rhythms that connect all things, and that is really
the heart of it for me. Patterns is an attempt to show that what links a salt lake, an ice
cave, a fossil, and a microscopic organism is not just visual resemblance, but a shared
belonging within one living system.”
You’ve also included microscopic patterns in the book. What is your process for taking
these? And how do you decide what to photograph?
“The microscopic images begin with the same impulse as the larger landscape work:
curiosity about hidden structure. I’m interested in forms that most of us pass through life
never seeing, yet which carry an extraordinary sense of order, intricacy, and design. To
photograph them, I work through a microscope, which requires a very different technical
process from photographing in the field, but conceptually it is part of the same search.
Most of my microscopic images require focus stacking of up to 25 images because the
depth of field is miniscule.
“What attracts me to microscopic subjects is not simply that they are small or surprising.
It is that they often reveal the same formal principles I’m seeing at larger scales. A
diatom, for example, may contain a level of geometry and elegance that feels every bit
as powerful as an aerial river system or a glacial formation. In the context of Patterns,
that matters enormously, because the book is trying to collapse our assumptions about
scale. It asks the viewer to see that a pattern does not become less profound because it
is tiny, nor more profound because it is monumental.
“As for deciding what to photograph, I look for subjects that do two things. First, they
need to stand on their own as visually compelling images. Second, they need to
participate in the larger conversation of the book. I’m always asking whether a
microscopic photograph extends the visual language of the project. Does it echo
something elsewhere in the sequence? Does it deepen the idea that nature repeats
certain structures across scale? If it does, then it belongs. If it is merely novel, it
probably doesn’t.”
You wrote in the introduction to your book: “Beneath the surface of what we see lies
structure, repetition, and intelligence, proof that the world is not just alive, but speaking.”
Can you talk more about how you experience this?
“That comment is really about paying attention. The world often presents itself first as
surface, color, drama, atmosphere, spectacle. Those things matter, and photography can certainly begin there. But when I stay with a subject longer, I start to sense that
beneath appearance, there is organization. Forms repeat. Rhythms recur. Similar
solutions arise in very different contexts. At that point, nature begins to feel less like
scenery and more like expression.
“When I say the world is ‘speaking,” I don’t mean that metaphor in a mystical or
sentimental way. I mean that the visible world is full of legible traces of process.
Patterns are the record of forces at work. They show where water has flowed, where ice
has compressed, where minerals have crystallized, where organisms have adapted,
and where time has layered change upon change. In that sense, nature is constantly
communicating how it came to be what it is.
“Photography, at its best, helps me enter that conversation. It slows me down enough to
recognize that what first appears abstract or beautiful also carries information and
meaning. And when those same visual structures begin turning up in very different
places, in an animal marking, a fossil spiral, a shoreline, or a microscopic form, I
experience a strong sense of continuity. The world feels less fragmented. It feels
articulate, interconnected, and deeply alive. That, ultimately, is what Patterns is trying to
share. Recent coverage of the book describes these recurring forms as the “hidden
visual language of the natural world,” and that phrase resonates with me because it
captures both the poetry and the underlying truth of what I see.”
All proceeds from Patterns: Art of the Natural World support Vital Impacts, the nonprofit founded by Ami Vitale that funds conservation efforts and emerging storytellers worldwide. In New York, McCormack’s images will be displayed outdoors on 6-by-6-foot photocubes throughout the South Street Seaport in collaboration with the South Street Seaport Museum as part of Photoville, running from April 22 to June 14, 2026. A solo exhibition, Elements of Wonder: Where Nature Becomes Art, opens April 17, 2026 at CENTER Santa Fe and runs through May 17, 2026.
