Thomas Joshua Cooper: The world's edge: the atlas of emptiness and extremity
- Submitting institution
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Glasgow School of Art
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 7135
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
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- Publisher
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art and DelMonico Books: Prestel
- ISBN
- 9783791358260
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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2
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Of the 145 photographs in this monograph/exhibition, 65% have never before been published/exhibited (35% have). Worth noting too is that each picture carries two dates: the date it was made in the field and the date it was developed as negative/print. In these cases, a small number of works were made prior to 2014 but printed thereafter e.g. a series of photographs made in Canada in 2013/2016 (pp.126-129) and 2015/2017 (p.134). This monograph includes a substantial body of work made and published between 2014-2017, however, its inclusion of 35% previously published work informed our decision not to double-weight it.
This monograph accompanied a major museum retrospective of Thomas Joshua Cooper’s research at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), 22nd Sept 2019 – 2nd Feb 2020 (86,454 visitors).
The World’s Edge: The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity is the presentational culmination of a 32-year and c.700+ pictures project, The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity, funded collectively by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, Creative Scotland and LACMA (totaling £5.6m approx.). The goal of this extended project was to create a photographic atlas of the remote edges of the Atlantic basin, a view of the ‘old world’ of ‘wilderness,’ untouched by human activity; what Cooper refers to as the ‘far field.’ He is the first and possibly last human to undertake this expedition and the only artist-researcher to have made pictures of both the North and South poles.
Cooper’s research, situated at the intersection of art and photography and deploying solely a 19th century box camera with no digital back-up, is analogous to exploration. He advocates slowness in relation to: the time and risks of remote expeditions, undertaken with field guides deploying GPS to map the precise locations of cardinal extremes visited; his meticulous darkroom processes; and discreet audience encounters. His aim throughout is to capture each photograph as an artefact made in and not of the landscape. Drawing on cultural geography, especially Roderick Nash, Yi-Fu Tuan and Denis Cosgrove, his formal language is elemental, often eschewing the horizon to focus on light and movement on water, rocks, trees and grass.
Each of the 145 photographs (65% of which have never before been seen) within the exhibition/book carries two dates: the date it was made in the field; and the date it was developed as negative/print. This monograph includes a body of work taken between 2014-2017.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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