Photographer and conservationist Jon McCormack: “Earth Day is a time to reflect, notice and pause”

It was semi-arid, with only about 16 inches of rain a year, and life there was pretty harsh. The closest town was about 15 miles away.

The mailbox, on the main road, was a mile from the house, and it was 15 miles to school every day on the school bus.

My father embraced regenerative agriculture long before it was an interesting thing. The farming world in Australia had largely gone chemical, but Dad was resistant to that.

His view was that we’d been farming the land for over 100 years and it had been fine, so there was no real reason to change. He also said that we didn’t know what this was going to do to the earth.

The other thing about growing up in that part of the world is that there’s a lot of space and natural beauty. We didn’t have electricity until after I went to boarding school.

We had a 32V generator that Dad would turn on at night so we could watch a little black-and-white TV, but we spent a lot of time outside because that was really all there was.

This informed my view of how I think about the environment and how the environment shows up in my life.

Western Queensland is a very textured environment. It goes from semi-arid to arid, with the occasional small waterhole that would be surrounded by trees, lush grass, animals, and birds.

At some point, my dad gave me a camera that had belonged to my grandfather. It was made in the late 1940s and was an Olympus 35 Mark IV, I think.

Nothing about it was automatic – there was an external light meter, for example. The other kicker was that the closest place to get film developed was a two-hour drive away, so I’d only get film back every couple of months.

This made me a student of photography in terms of taking photographs and making sure I was taking good notes as well.

And I needed to do that; I’d get my photos back and I’d be like, “What did I do there?” That was quite annoying at the time, but also deeply instructive.

When we were all stuck inside, I was lucky because there’s a little beach not far from where I live. When it became clear that we couldn’t catch Covid just from going outside, I would wander on the beach every afternoon just to get out of the house.

Of course, I took my camera with me and started making photographs. But after a while, how many sunsets can you take and still be interested?

So I started to look for these intriguing little details, interesting patterns that could only happen one time because they were a result of a combination of the tide, the light, wind, seagrasses and so on.

Then, I ended up making a decision that I would stick to for the remainder of lockdown; I went to the beach every day and took one photograph with a single lens.

Because of the compositional discipline of only having one telephoto lens, I started looking for the deeper details. Searching for these patterns became fascinating to me, so I ended up spending four or five months seeking out the patterns formed by light, wind and water.

Looking back at my earlier work, a lot of it was about patterns. When I think about the photographs I made while working in tech in India, my strongest ones tend to be those where I’m much more focused on a pattern than whatever the charismatic subject is.

By the time Covid finally ended, my photography had moved onto this idea of looking for patterns. I see wonder in patterns and find that from a neuroscience perspective, patterns – especially ones occurring in nature – have a profound effect on the brain, because they engage you without taxing you.

Patterns in nature are relatively regular, but never repeat exactly. Here’s an interesting fact… if you look at Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, they are true fractals [repetitive geometric patterns forming a larger pattern], and that’s why these messy, squiggly things are so relaxing.

It turns out you have a choice; you can go and spend a few million dollars on a Jackson Pollock or you can go and walk outside – I’ll take the walking option.

So, photographically, I really resonated with these patterns. Part of it – a lot of it, in fact – was just because of the personal effect that had on me. For me, my photography is now hunt and peck, looking for interesting patterns. And even the journey on its own is fun.

The other thing that I learned during the pandemic was that it was OK if there was no photograph to be had. I wasn’t going to force it. I wasn’t looking for winners. I wasn’t looking for great shots.

Instead, I would be thinking, ‘Just let the photograph happen’. If it did, that was fantastic; if it didn’t, I would still have a good time sitting on the beach. I became a far more relaxed photographer because of it.

Of course, the great irony in the book is that I traveled all around the world to take the photographs, but the key thing that it taught me is that wonder is everywhere.

If you take a blade of grass and put it under the microscope, it becomes this fantastical thing. Ironically, I travelled the world, only to find that there’s wonder in my back garden.

In a helicopter, I tend to fly at about 500 feet, so a 100-400mm is my go-to lens for that. The microscopic pictures were probably the biggest adventure, figuring out how to do microscopic photography, using a Zeiss microscope with a mirrorless body attached.

Actually, here’s an interesting story… that slide that looks like a whole load of buttons [on p121 of the book], they’re all diatoms [single-celled algae] and every one is smaller than the width of a human hair.

I actually bought that slide at an auction. It was made by a company called Fenton & Son in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the late 1800s. Remember, this was back in the days of Victorian Britain, where you would have people hand-arranging diatoms on slides.

Then, in drawing rooms, people would get out their microscopes so they could observe natural history. It’s just one of those wonderful things that you sort of discover along the way. This idea of looking closely at nature is not actually a new thing at all.

We’re the only planet we have found that’s like this in the universe – that’s not to say that there aren’t others out there, but Earth is an extraordinary place. And Earth Day was set aside for people to notice that once a year.

With the exception of the final image in the book, I’ve taken away all scale references. That was intentional because I want people to look at a photograph and say, “What on earth is that?”

Then just by asking that question and engaging in the caption, they might think, “Oh, wow, that’s cobalt blue ancient ice in Antarctica, the old forest of the ice. What a fantastic thing”. So I do hope that Patterns is a crossover book.

Of course, it would be great if anyone buys my book, but I’m less worried about people who are already sold on the environment buying the book because they’re already more likely to agree with the things that I’ve got to say.

What I’m much more interested in is people who pick up the book and just have an opportunity to go, “Wow! This is really fun, this is really interesting”.