Thomas Joshua Cooper
Artist statement
I have, since 1968, stuck to vows made in a
moment of epiphany to make art only with
my 1898 AGFA camera, to only make images
outdoors, and to only ever make one image in
any one place. With this singular and focused
body of work, I have come to be regarded as
one of the world’s important landscape artists.
The World’s Edge – The Atlantic Basin Project
is an ambitious mission, begun nearly twenty
years ago, to photographically ‘map’ the
extremities of the lands and islands of all
five continents that surround the entire
Atlantic Ocean.
The images of water encapsulate both the
otherworldliness and the vital reality of the
sea: the ethereal and frightening power of
water – light, shadow, movement, depth, and
volume. Most of these locations are difficult
to reach; the border between man’s foothold
on earth and the unknown depths of the
substance making up the vast majority of the
world. Some places are endangered – with
the delicate balance of the planet disrupted
can these places be sustained? My project
is a subtle, aesthetic and almost abstract
meditation on the process of globalization,
and the wandering transoceanic evolution
of Western culture, and the human stories
wrapped up in this grand sweep. Water is
an element that binds us all, a vital necessity,
a force with the power of affecting life and
death. Growing up in the wilderness I learned
the visceral connection between land and
identity, as well as the tendency of the human
eye to overlay what it surveys with stories
and memories. When I travel to the edges of
land, where water is all that lies ahead, these
stories are clearly audible. My pictures offer an
opportunity to meditate upon the grandeur of
history and are an analogy for the particularity
and sameness of our experience, especially
in this age of increasing homogeneity;
when the sustainability of our existence
is everyone’s concern.
