THOMAS JOSHUA COOPER
Scattered Waters
Sources Streams Rivers
20 February – 11 April 2015
Private View Thursday 19 February
Thomas Joshua Cooper is one of the most celebrated and distinctive landscape photographers
working today. He was born in California in 1946, of mixed Jewish and Cherokee descent, but he has
lived in Scotland since he took up a post at the Glasgow School of Art in 1982 where he is the
founding Head of Photography.
Similar to artists such as Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, Cooper is a traveller whose extraordinary
photographs are often made in unknown and un-noted corners of the world. Much of his working life
has been spent away from Scotland in the role of an explorer, taking him from pole to pole, old world
to new, but between journeys he always returns to his studio and his dark room in Glasgow.
Scattered Waters is the result of journeys around Scotland, photographs which capture the rivers and
streams traversing the country. Cooper has worked on this project for the last 32 years, chronicling
the rivers that help to record and define Scotland’s identity, both geographically and poetically. A
series of pictures of the Forth and Clyde rivers crossing the country from east to west and a Sea River
triptych from the Gulf of Corryvreckan off the west coast of Scotland are among the works which will
feature in the exhibition.
A long time ago Cooper made a series of vows: to only photograph landscape; only use black and
white film; only use one camera and one lens; and to only ever make one exposure – ‘one picture,
one chance’. Capturing a single image can therefore involve months of preparation and arduous
travel as the given location is first found on a map, tracked down and then photographed; each place
the subject of a single 5x7 inch negative, taken with a weighty wooden field camera from 1898. They
are meditative, almost philosophical images, hovering between abstraction and intense figurative
detail, exquisitely hand printed by the artist in the late nineteenth century manner, with layers of
selenium and silver.
Scattered Waters: Sources Streams Rivers is Cooper’s ‘love letter to Scotland’, drawing on the allure
of its landscape to produce some of the most beautiful and unexpected photographs that he has
ever made.