Thomas Joshua Cooper: The World's Edge

by Michael Govan, Rebecca Morse, Thomas Joshua Cooper (Contributor)

This book showcases Thomas Joshua Cooper's monumental forty-five year career as a landscape photographer.

Working solely with an 1898 Agfa field camera, Thomas Joshua Cooper has established himself as one of the foremost photographers of our time. His magnificent black-and-white seascapes explore specific points on the globe--often at the most remote areas, where sea and land meet. Fans of Cooper's Atlas project, in which he has charted the Atlantic Basin, will be thrilled to find a generous selection of those images here--abstractions ranging from pitch black to clear white, and subtle gradations in between. Exquisitely reproduced, these photographs reveal the coastlines of the five continents that encircle the Atlantic Ocean. This volume also features images that deal with themes such as the earth's changing environment, historical narratives, and North America's great rivers and their sources. Enhancing this book are an essay by Michael Govan; biographies of the artist by Rebecca Morse and Anne Lyden, International Photography Curator at the National Galleries of Scotland; and a chronicle of the Atlas project by Christie Davis of the Lannan Foundation. Poems by Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Roethke round out this retrospective book of one of the most celebrated and distinctive photographers working today.

Published with Los Angeles County Museum of Art

208 pages, Hardcover

Published September 17, 2019

Reviews

[Diogenes Grief]

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (https://www.lacma.org/) is currently (at the time of this “review”) hosting a major Cooper exhibit to which this book is the catalogue for. The New Yorker wrote a wonderful piece about the artist and his craft, so why should I bother. Here it is: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

The catalogue cannot compare to the large-print photographs, but it at least gives a great impression and it is built for longevity, and in this era of Instagram, true Photographers (the capital “P” meant for emphasis for professionals) face almost certain extinction. Cooper will undoubtedly go out as a last explorer of what should be considered the remaining remote edges of the Earth, before the human herds descend upon—and ruin—them too.

[Ryan]

Thomas Joshua Cooper is the greatest landscape photographer you've never heard of. I saw a selection of his prints at the recently reimagined and rehoused permanent collection at LACMA in the astounding Peter Zumthor designed Geffen building. The photographs were of extremity, of the literal edges of the world. For over 30 years he has been working on a project, Atlas, which takes him to departure and landing points of famous explorers from the "Old" and "New" worlds. He only uses and antique 5x7 Agfa camera and only makes one exposure per site, which is risky and kind of insane. But that's the process; part of his rigor which takes him further into the conceptual camp and out of the documentary school of photographers. He is himself a product of two worlds; born in America and raised, in part, on the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation. He was schooled in California and lives and works and teaches in Scotland. But while his excursions use the template of early colonialists, his photographs don't glamorize their endeavors or seek to take ownership of what is photographed, but rather attempt to capture what those places feel like, what is the emotional truth of a place or of an experience instead of a document or fact. His project, funded largely by the Lannan Foundation, is a sweeping survey of a world that is full of wonder, danger, and a natural glory that is rapidly being eroded by humanity.

I listened to Manifestations in the Shadow of an Uncertain Land by Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe and All Gates Open by Blood Incantation while reading this book.