Since the early 1970s, Thomas Joshua Cooper has been making photographs outdoors. He travels to remote, often isolated sites and makes one negative per location using a nineteenth-century Agfa Ansco view camera. In his series The World’s Edge—The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity, begun in 1987, Cooper photographs the Atlantic Basin from its most extreme north, south, east, and west land points, as in Moonlight—The Mid-Atlantic Ocean, Cape Manuel, Dakar, the South-Most Point of the Cape Verde Peninsula, Senegal (2004). Cooper pictures this rocky outcropping at night so that it glistens amidst the Atlantic as the westernmost point of the Afro-Eurasia mainland. His photographs are typically made from where the ocean meets the land and include neither a horizon line nor the terrain directly below the artist’s feet, but rather the surrounding “sea space.” He composes each scene by determining its edges, saying, “Locate the edges and the center will take care of itself.” The resulting black-and-white photographs capture the psychological impact of these places through geographic and atmospheric details. They are not documents but artworks meant to stimulate the viewer’s imagination.
Cooper’s circumnavigation project, which has involved travel throughout the United Kingdom and northern Europe, the west coast of Africa, the east coasts of South and Central America, the United States, Canada, and both the North and South Poles, has yielded more than 700 photographs. He is the only artist to have captured all of these sites along the Atlantic Basin. As climate change causes sea levels to rise, many of the land points pictured in Cooper’s photographs will soon be underwater and no longer accessible.
Rebecca Morse, Curator, Wallis Annenberg Photography Department
2024