Naturecore isn’t just moss and mushrooms—though honestly, those help.
I spent three years photographing wild landscapes before I realized what I was actually chasing: a feeling that defied Instagram’s clean grids and Pinterest’s aspirational boards. Naturecore, as an aesthetic movement, emerged somewhere around 2019—maybe earlier, depending on who you ask—as a response to cottagecore’s domesticated prettiness. Where cottagecore showed you the garden gate and the pie cooling on the windowsill, naturecore dragged you past the fence line into overgrown meadows and tangled underbrush. It’s the difference between a curated wildflower bouquet and the chaotic sprawl of Queen Anne’s lace choking a roadside ditch. The aesthetic thrives on imperfection: lichen-covered stones, fog obscuring treelines, water so dark you can’t see the bottom. Turns out, people were starving for something that looked genuinely untouched, something that didn’t require a ring light or a styled flat lay.
The visual language pulls heavily from ecological photography traditions—think Eliot Porter’s dye-transfer prints from the 1960s, or more recently, the moody forest work of Kilian Schönberger. But here’s the thing: naturecore democratized that high-art sensibility. Anyone with a smartphone could capture moss closeups or capture rain on ferns, and suddenly wild outdoor visuals flooded Tumblr, then TikTok, then everywhere else. The palette tends toward desaturated greens, browns, greys—colors that suggest decay as much as growth.
The Ecological Psychology Behind Why Wild Disorder Resonates With Modern Viewers
There’s actual science here, not just vibes.
Environmental psychologists like Rachel and Stephen Kaplan spent decades studying what they called “attention restoration theory”—the idea that natural environments, especially complex ones, help our overworked brains recover from cognitive fatigue. Wild landscapes demand what they termed “soft fascination”: your attention wanders gently across textures, patterns, layers of vegetation, without the harsh focus required by urban environments or screens. Naturecore visuals exploit this perfectly. When you’re scrolling through your feed and hit an image of tangled roots or a forest floor carpeted in decaying leaves, your nervous system responds differently than it does to, say, a minimalist product shot. Studies from the University of Michigan found that even brief exposure to nature imagery—we’re talking 40 seconds, give or take—can improve concentration and reduce stress markers. The aesthetic’s appeal isn’t accidental; it’s tapping into roughly 200,000 years of human evolution that wired us to find safety and resources in biodiverse landscapes.
I used to think the attraction was purely nostalgic, some collective mourning for wilderness we’ve paved over. But it’s more complicated. Naturecore also carries an undertone of wildness-as-resistance—a quiet rejection of the sanitized, optimized, productivity-obsessed spaces we inhabit daily. The images don’t promise anything useful. They just exist, messy and indifferent.
Wait—maybe that’s the point.
How Photographers and Content Creators Actually Construct Authentic-Looking Wild Aesthetics
Here’s where things get weird, because “authentic” naturecore requires surprising amounts of intention.
Professional nature photographers I’ve interviewed—people shooting for conservation organizations or editorial clients—describe a process that’s part documentation, part curation. They’re not staging scenes with props, but they are selecting specific angles, waiting for particular light conditions (overcast days are gold for this aesthetic), and editing to emphasize texture over color saturation. The goal is to make wilderness look simultaneously accessible and slightly forbidding. Too pretty, and it reads as cottagecore. Too harsh, and it loses the contemplative quality that makes the aesthetic appealing. Mikko Lagerstedt, a Finnish landscape photographer whose work definitley influenced the movement, shoots almost exclusively during blue hour and in fog—conditions that naturally soften and obscure, creating that signature ambiguous-distance feeling. His images rarely include clear focal points; your eye wanders, unsettled, which apparently is exactly what people want.
On the content creator side, the tools have shifted. Apps like VSCO and Lightroom Mobile offer presets specifically designed to replicate film grain and muted palettes—the visual shorthand for “this wasn’t taken with a phone, even though it absolutely was.” There’s a whole micro-industry now around teaching people to shoot “like film” digitally. The irony isn’t lost on me: we’re using cutting-edge technology to simulate older, less precise processes because imperfection has become a luxury good in visual culture.
Some creators go further, intentionally including elements that signal untamed spaces: animal tracks in mud, spider webs beaded with dew, fungi sprouting from rotting logs. These aren’t accidents—they’re carefully selected details that anchor the image in ecological processes. Decay matters enormously in naturecore. Unlike cottagecore, which celebrates harvest and preservation, naturecore lingers on decomposition, on the mushroom breaking down the fallen tree, on the way autumn leaves turn to mulch.
I guess it makes sense that an aesthetic born during late-stage capitalism would find beauty in things falling apart.
The challenge, at least for people trying to make this work commercially, is that naturecore resists commodification by its very nature—no pun intended. You can’t really sell wildness. You can sell hiking gear, field guides, presets, workshops, but the core appeal lies in something that exists outside transaction logic. The best naturecore images feel stolen, glimpsed, almost accidental—which is, of course, incredibly difficult to achieve deliberately. I’ve watched photographers spend hours positioning themselves to capture a “spontaneous” moment of light breaking through forest canopy, waiting for wind to move branches just so. The labor disappears into the final image, which has to look like no labor happened at all.
Anyway, that’s the trick: making effort invisible so wonder can emerge.
