Thomas Joshua Cooper: The World’s Edge

“I thought maybe I could learn something by standing on the continental edges of the source of Western civilization and trying to imagine, with my back to the land, what happened when the carriers of the culture went over the edge of the map,” he told me. Another time, he said, “Emptiness and extremity are what I was searching for, with the firm belief that it’d kill me or transform me.”

(Goodyear, 2020)

Thomas Joshua Cooper is a Californian photographer now living in Scotland. The World’s edge is part of a large body of work called “The Atlas of emptiness and extremity”. Viewing the images, taken with his “baby”, an analog wooden box camera, it’s no surprise that he was mentored by Ansel Adams.

According to Richard Learoyd, “Adams was chasing his own version of the photographic picturesque. It was a language that was understood, and he was using it. With Cooper, he’s not using the language of the picturesque—he’s using the language of discovery and abstraction.”

(Goodyear, 2020)

Cooper’s images represent the ‘sea spaces’ at extreme points of the land. There is no horizon, animals or land. He presents a world as it was prior to colonisation. Whilst he admires the explorers who ‘conquered these new lands, he also recognises what they brought with them. (Goodyear, 2020)

As expected with using his Agfa Ansco view camera and typically long exposures, the black and white images have a sense of movement and stillness. There is a timelessness, in terms of when the photo may have been taken. Cooper decidedly takes his images from the edge with a “photo or death” mentality, enduring harsh conditions to access these remote ‘edges’ which as sea levels rise will in time disappear.

References and Bibliography

1. Lacma.org. (2020). Thomas Joshua Cooper: The World’s Edge | LACMA. [online] Available at: https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/thomas-joshua-cooper-worlds-edge [Accessed 2 March. 2020].
2. Goodyear, D. (2020). A Photographer at the Ends of the Earth. [online] The New Yorker. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/07/a-photographer-at-the-ends-of-the-earth [Accessed 2 Mar. 2020].