Australian photographer and conservationist Jon McCormack opens a busy spring on April 17, 2026, when his solo exhibition Elements of Wonder: Where Nature Becomes Art launches at CENTER Santa Fe, running through May 17 — just five days before Damiani releases his photobook Patterns: Art of the Natural World to coincide with Earth Day on April 22.

The book spans an extraordinary range of subjects: a bear caught mid-shake, aerial views of a salt lake in Botswana, ice caves in Iceland and Vatnajökull, and microscopic studies of rocks and minerals including jasper, quartzite and tigerite. McCormack's microscopic images often require focus stacking of up to 25 frames, because the depth of field through a microscope is miniscule.

All proceeds from the book support Vital Impacts, the nonprofit founded by photographer Ami Vitale that funds conservation efforts and emerging storytellers worldwide.

How did lockdown change the work?

The project emerged from a pivotal shift in McCormack's practice during the COVID-19 pandemic. Travel restrictions confined him, and repetition reshaped his seeing. "COVID changed the scale at which I was paying attention," he says. "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."

The constraint forced what he calls creative honesty. "Repetition removed distraction," McCormack reflects. "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." In his words, the pandemic "narrowed my geography but expanded my seeing."

He describes a transition from hunting for pictures to being receptive to them — a slower process in which subtleties began to matter: reflected color, minute shifts in angle, small alignments of form, and transient elements like mist or foam.

Why pattern rather than place?

The breakthrough in editing came when McCormack laid out his early, impressionistic coastal studies and found they weren't holding together. The organizing principle, he realized, was not place at all. It was pattern.

Once that clicked, his subject choice shifted from category to 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," he explains.

A diatom, he argues, may contain a level of geometry and elegance as powerful as an aerial river system or a glacial formation. A pattern does not become less profound because it is tiny, nor more profound because it is monumental.

What does McCormack mean by a 'speaking' world?

In his introduction he writes: "Beneath the surface of what we see lies structure, repetition, and intelligence, proof that the world is not just alive, but speaking." He insists this is not mysticism. Patterns are legible traces of process — records of where water has flowed, where ice has compressed, where minerals have crystallized, where organisms have adapted, and where time has layered change upon change.

"When I photograph them, I feel I'm not just photographing surface appearance," he says. "I'm photographing evidence, signs of how life and matter organize themselves."

The microscopic work carries a personal charge. "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."

His subjects must pass a two-part test: stand alone as visually compelling images, and extend the book's visual language. "If it is merely novel, it probably doesn't" belong, he says.

Where can the work be seen?

In New York, McCormack's images will appear 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 April 22 through June 14, 2026.

With the Santa Fe solo show, the Photoville installation and the Damiani book arriving within a single season, McCormack's argument — that wonder depends not on distance but on the quality of attention — will face its broadest public test yet.