Johnny McCormack (Ngāi Tahu)
Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa

Working across photography and book form, Johnny McCormack traces the shifting edges of land, time, and memory. Based in Tāmaki Makaurau, his practice moves between remote alpine regions, fault lines, and Pacific terrains—sites where the earth is in motion, and presence feels provisional.

With a background in design and photography (Victoria University of Wellington, 2000), McCormack’s work sits within an expanded documentary tradition—observational, yet attuned to deeper temporal currents. His images are less about capture, more about witness: slow accumulations of light, surface, and geological change.

Over two decades, he has built a body of work that navigates both Aotearoa and international landscapes, exhibited locally and shared widely through editorial and digital platforms. Underpinning this is an ongoing commitment to the photobook as a considered, physical space for image-making.

TEMPORAL (2023), his first self-published book, emerged alongside his second solo exhibition. The work surveys a landscape in flux—where tectonic movement, glacial drift, and climatic forces leave quiet inscriptions across the land. Here, time is not linear but layered: compressed into surfaces, held in strata, and revealed through careful looking.

In McCormack’s work, land is not fixed. It is shaped, eroded, and continually becoming.