Dynamic patterns of the natural world
A new book from photographer Jon McCormack collects his shots of patterns in nature from around the world, from flamingoes to icebergs
\Photographs by Jon McCormack
Words by James Woodford
Dynamic patterns of the natural world
A new book from photographer Jon McCormack collects his shots of patterns in nature from around the world, from flamingoes to icebergs
\Photographs by Jon McCormack
Words by James Woodford
Jon McCormack’s camera is drawn to the place where life and its constraints – gravity, fluid dynamics, climate, light and time – meet and are "in conversation" with each other.
"Life then responds creatively to those conditions, generating its own patterns – branching, flocking, migrating, growing, adapting, repeating," he says.
"What interests me most is that constant conversation between the two. Patterns are not static designs laid over the world. They show us that life and environment are continuously shaping one another."
This is his shot of a glacial river in Iceland, contrasting with the landscape around it - one of the many images in his new book , out on 22 April from Damiani Books.
The spiral of a sea snail’s shell, found in South Carolina
The spiral of a sea snail’s shell, found in South Carolina
A hibiscus flower petal, found in Minnesota, US
A hibiscus flower petal, found in Minnesota, US
This rhodochrosite rock, in Argentina, looks like jagged teeth when seen up close
This rhodochrosite rock, in Argentina, looks like jagged teeth when seen up close
At the Upper Yosemite Falls, in the US, mist and shifting sunlight create a rainbow
At the Upper Yosemite Falls, in the US, mist and shifting sunlight create a rainbow
McCormack grew up in Western Queensland, Australia, where the environment can be brutally dry for years and then, in the wake of cyclonic rain systems, turn into an inland sea of booming life.
“It taught me that beauty and harshness are not opposites,” he says. “They often exist in the same place.”
McCormack says he is drawn to patterns not simply because they are beautiful, but because they reveal how order and adaptation emerge from difficult conditions.
“Australia gave me that way of seeing”
Image: A cloud of flamingos sweeps across Suguta Valley, Kenya
That interest in contrast, and in patterns, has taken McCormack to every continent over the past decade.
“But just as important were the patterns I found close to home,” he says. “During the early pandemic, I began walking the same small, rocky beach near my home in northern California, photographing only that stretch with one camera and one lens.”
He says nature works through underlying structures that are often mathematical and physical, yet “what we experience is something emotional and poetic”.
“Braided rivers, mineral crystals, ice fractures, bird flocks and tidal flows are all shaped by forces such as pressure, turbulence, repetition, growth and constraint.”
A melting Antarctic iceberg reveals older, darker blue ice. The older ice is darker as it is compressed over centuries, and contains fewer air bubbles
The marsh grasses of Kenya's Suguta valley are sculpted in these patterns by the winds
A Steller sea lion near Hornby Island in British Columbia, above a field of sea urchins
These delicate rings were left on the floor of an ice cave in Iceland as floodwaters receded
Courtesy of and published by Damiani Books
Courtesy of and published by Damiani Books