Photographer Jon McCormack has found himself repelling into Arctic ice caves in Svalbard, Norway, diving into the frigid waters off the coast of British Columbia and hanging out of helicopter doors above southern Kenya all in search of his next great picture.
But despite many grand adventures, it was an unlikely set of photos he took just a mile from his home that propelled him on a years-long endeavor to photograph nature from a new perspective.
It was 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic had brought McCormack’s world to a halt. So he began a new routine: A nightly walk along the beach near his house in Pacific Grove, California. His camera made the trip with him.
A week into the practice, McCormack began to notice how the landscape would shift daily. “This magical combination of the tide, the light, the wind, would create these little compositions that kind of exist only sort of one time,” McCormack said during a recent interview with CNN. “I really got to understand the details, understand how it would change every night, see patterns form where there hadn’t been patterns before.”
By the time the world opened back up, McCormack’s photography had fundamentally changed. “I’d become, by then, a different photographer,” he said. Instead of grand landscapes and sweeping vistas, McCormack was drawn to “these small patterns and these small vignettes in nature.”
“I just started to see them everywhere,” he recalled.
The patterns McCormack has captured and rediscovered since fill the pages of his new monograph Patterns: Art of the Natural World. In it, readers will find arresting and colorful photographs with subjects that are recognizable and also virtually indistinguishable. Sand dunes turn into line drawings, microscopic organisms to jewels, and rivers more closely resemble woven yarn than running water.
McCormack estimates two-thirds of the photos in the book were made during and after the pandemic; the rest are past works he found while digging through his archive.
“I’ve been a photographer for 40 years and it turns out that I’ve been photographing patterns for a lot of that time,” he said. “It was just never an intentional thing. It was just sort of part of who I was.”
While many of the pictures are from far-off corners of the planet, McCormack emphasizes: “Nature is never that far away.” The book includes a macro image of a hibiscus flower from his friend’s suburban garden and photos from his first days walking on that Northern California beach.
Ultimately, McCormack’s hope is that his book — which is intentionally not “a fine art book” — will help people feel like nature is accessible to them.
“It really is designed to be able to go anywhere and be accessible by anybody, with this one central message of, our world’s a pretty cool place,” McCormack said. “You should go out and see it. And then maybe, after you’ve gone and seen it, maybe you’ll protect it.”
Editor’s note: Jon McCormack’s book “Patterns: Art of the Natural World” was published by Damiani Books and is available now.