Freeman Patterson’s landscapes – far-flung places seemingly untouched by humans – reveal a symmetry and pattern of light, line, and colour. For Patterson, nature is beauty, spiritual reflection, and potential grace.

Some may find such iconic images idealized, even generic, but Patterson’s popularity suggests that his work represents something we avidly wish to see. He is one of the country’s most widely known and honoured photographers, as well as a bestselling author. His new book, ShadowLight, is called a “mid-career retrospective,” and contains more than 100 photographs chosen from three decades of work. The images are accompanied by text in which the photographer traces the visual influences, themes, and travels that have shaped his working life.

Patterson writes in his introduction of being torn between personal revelation and wider relevance in the book, and one wishes he had not been so successful in subduing the former impulse. The book eventually broadens out into a fairly routine discussion of photographic seeing and thinking. But the opening chapters centre on Patterson’s constricted family life on a farm in southern New Brunswick, and his search for a vocation to satisfy both the spiritual and creative longings that he recognized only upon leaving home.

Patterson’s descriptive language is lovely, and despite a slightly therapized tone, the fierce loneliness and esthetic hunger of his past inevitably informs our reading of his mostly unpopulated landscapes. Patterson characterizes his life in photography as a quest for balance, but there are hints of something darker and more chaotic beneath the surfaces. It emerges most strikingly in photographs where nature and culture meet, as in his haunting series from a deserted mining town in Namibia, where sand dunes invade abandoned structures. The physical world feels vulnerable and transitory in such images, and Patterson powerfully underscores the inherently elegiac nature of the medium itself: photography captures only the past, caught fleetingly in shadow and light.