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Thomas Joshua Cooper

Thomas Joshua Cooper is one of the most celebrated and distinctive landscape photographers working anywhere in the world today. He was born in California in 1946 but has lived in Scotland for many years. Cooper is the founding head of photography at Glasgow School of Art but spends much of his life seeking out the edges of the world. Like artists such as Richard Long, and Hamish Fulton, Cooper is a traveller, a nomadic artist whose extraordinary photographs are made in series at significant points around the globe, most often at its extremities.

Thomas Joshua Cooper is one of the most celebrated and distinctive landscape photographers working anywhere in the world today. He was born in California in 1946 but has lived in Scotland for many years. Cooper is the founding head of photography at Glasgow School of Art but spends much of his life seeking out the edges of the world. Like artists such as Richard Long, and Hamish Fulton, Cooper is a traveller, a nomadic artist whose extraordinary photographs are made in series at significant points around the globe, most often at its extremities.

Using an 1898 Agfa field camera and specially made photographic plates, Thomas Joshua Cooper creates extraordinary, meditative landscape photographs printed with selenium-toned silver gelatin. Each work begins as a location found on a map, which Cooper then exhaustively researches and tracks down. Composing only outdoors, he captures each site in a single exposure, stressing the “made” and “built” quality of each print over its documentary or snapshot elements. In his ongoing “Atlas Project” (1989-), Cooper charts the extremities of land in the Atlantic Basin, from South Africa and Scandinavia to the Arctic, Antarctica, and South America. Read our interview with Thomas Joshua Cooper.

The Promise in West, the Allure in North, the Fear in South

Fragments from the Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity

During the last three decades, Thomas has been involved in the making and assembly of a large, thematic body of work, that has developed out of the physical act of visually and pictorially mapping the cardinal extremes. As the project reaches a conclusion, Thomas has put together a presentation that encompasses this vast body of work. Read our article from Beyond Words Exclusive of out of print and sign books of Thomas Joshua Cooper, including the 'The Promise in West, the Allure in North, the Fear in South' book

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