THOMAS JOSHUA COOPER, 1946

Thomas Joshua Cooper is a landscape photographer who, over the course of his career, has developed a unique technique which has over time, become his distinctive stylistic trademark. Born in California in 1946, he has lived in Scotland for many years. Founder and director of the Department of Photography at the Glasgow School of Art, Cooper has dedicated much of his life to exploring the edges of the world.

 

Like other ‘walking artists’ such as Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, Cooper is a tireless explorer whose extraordinary photographic series take shape in archetypal and remote places,  found in the distant corners of the earth.

 

Days, weeks or even months of research, of differing perspectives and the study of maps, go into the long preparation process of each image. Places are identified, journeyed to and finally photographed with a single shot, taken on an old and heavy camera dating from 1898. The result is an image of great meditative, almost philosophical intensity which Cooper then develops in his darkroom using a sophisticated nineteenth-century technique of layers of silver and gold chloride.

 

He has published numerous books on photography, most recently The World’s Edge (2019), where he circumnavigates the furthest reaches of the Atlantic Ocean. Over the course of 32 years of research, the artist has crossed the cardinal points of the Atlantic basin’s surrounding continents, outlining a sort of idealised map from pole to pole.