Adam Thorman has spent eighteen years photographing landscapes, and in that time certain forms have crept into his field of vision. Creatures Found gathers the beings he has encountered in rocks, tree stumps and fences — shapes that emerge not because the world is enchanted but because the human eye is prone to pareidolia, the tendency to see familiar patterns in inanimate structures, such as faces in clouds and monsters in shadows. Thorman is less interested in fixing what each creature is than in leaving room for the viewer’s own act of recognition: the creature you find is not necessarily the one he found, and these creatures belong to the viewer as much as to him.

The book is published by The Eriskay Connection as a Swiss-bound softcover, 215 by 170 millimetres, with 128 pages and a sequence shaped by designer Rob van Hoesel. A poem by Zachary Schomburg runs alongside the photographs, occupying the same terrain of the half-seen and the nearly named. Lithography is by Marc Gijzen; production by Wilco Art Books.

What distinguishes the project is its patience. These are not one-off sightings arranged for effect but an accumulation across nearly two decades of walking with a camera, gathered from the creatures he has encountered over the past 18 years. The book’s proportions suit that: landscape pictures in a book that asks to be held and turned, close enough for the eye to hunt.

Its subject is useful as more than a curiosity. Pareidolia sits at the meeting point of perception, imagination and landscape photography’s old claim to describe what is there, and Thorman’s reluctance to overdetermine his creatures keeps the pictures open. For a collector, the photobook is the right vessel: the finding happens at reading distance, page by page, and the pleasure is in the moment before certainty.