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.
The capturing of any one image can involve days, weeks and months of preparation, arduous travel and considerable efforts to achieve. The locations are found on a map, tracked down and then photographed, each place the subject of a single negative taken with a weighty antique field camera. They are meditative, almost philosophical images, exquisitely printed by the artist in the 19th century manner with layers of silver and gold chloride.
For the last 32 years, Cooper has worked on a parallel project to his wider travels, chronicling his adopted land through the rivers that help to define its identity. This major body of work was recently shown in the solo exhibition Scattered Waters: Sources Streams Rivers at Ingleby Gallery from October - November 2014. Selected works from the exhibition were shown at The Fleming Collection, London from 20 February - 11 April 2015.
In 2019 Los Angeles County Museum of Art will present a major solo exhibition; the culmination of Cooper’s epic Atlas project.


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