I have been looking this week at the work of Thomas Joshua Cooper. Although born in California in 1946, Cooper has lived for many years in Scotland and is the founding head of Photography at the Glasgow School of Art. The website www.inglebygallery.com (from which the images below are taken) describes Cooper as “…a traveller, a nomadic artist whose extraordinary photographs are made in series at significant points around the globe, most often at its extremities”. Cooper produces his work using an antique wooden field camera from 1898 and printed by himself as selenium toned silver gelatin prints, only ever producing one image from the negative. His photographic process is to choose a site on a map, research it and then track it down. For example, his 1989 project called An Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity was inspired by Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world.

The resulting photographs have a very contemplative, surreal quality. But these are not traditional landscape images presenting a panorama of particular location; they have an almost abstract, intimate quality, revealing the essence of the location.

EAST-MOST – LOOKING TOWARDS SCOTLAND – THE NORTH CHANNEL AND THE IRISH SEA – BURR POINT, THE ARDS PENINSULA – COUNTY DOWN, NORTHERN IRELAND – THE EAST-MOST POINT OF IRELAND, 2013

I particularly like the work from the 2014 exhibition at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh entitled “Scattered Waters: Sources, Streams, Rivers”. This is a collection of photographs of rivers and streams in Scotland and again the mood is serene and contemplative. I like the idea that the viewer is left to contemplate the scene in their own time – there is nothing hurried about these images either in the way that they have been photographed or in how they are presented to the viewer. There is a timeless quality about them.

Evening -The River Dee
Portarch, Banchory, Kincardineshire, Scotland, 1997/2014

This is an approach to landscape photography that I would like to explore in my own work – moving away from the picturesque, or even sublime, and focussing on essence of the natural world at that moment in time and at that specific location.