A PHENOMENON OF EMPTINESS AND EXTREMITY
A CONVERSATION WITH THOMAS JOSHUA COOPER
by Janet Ruth Davies
Thomas Joshua Cooper b.1946 is a photographer, explorer and founder of the Fine Art Photography dept for Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. Over the past three decades he has visually mapped, located and investigated the extreme cardinal points of the five continents that form the Atlantic Basin in his project, The World’s Edge – The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity (2019). The images of this extensive durational work are imbued with a way of seeing which Cooper describes as ‘time-fullness’ – a visual pulse that encompasses both the instant and the epoch. In this interview, the artist discusses his singular approach to making pictures with his 1898 Agfa field camera. He remarks on his epic interrogation of unknown territories and reveals how photography is, for him, a process of questioning the elemental; where do pictures begin to exist physically, or tactically, or visually?
I would like to start with your early formative experiences of photography.
What compelled you to pick up the camera?
As an old person looking back on a young person’s mistakes – my own – I started photography by accident when I was at university and pursuing a Fine Art requirement in order to graduate. The first project I did on the course was so awful, in 1965, that the professor failed me in public. I burst into tears, which I almost never do, and begged in front of the entire class to be given another chance. It was the second chance that caused me to rethink everything because I was curious about photography. I reconsidered my approach and found that, goddamn! I really like making photographic pictures.
Later, I realised that I needed to make a living, so I tried every single type of photographic picture making that I could think of and explored commercial to mortuary, advertising to journalism. Documentary work was interesting whilst the rest were catastrophic failures, such as the weddings. Within six months all three couples whose weddings I had photographed were divorced, and I thought that was bad karma!
I’ve never taken a picture in my life; I hate the word; I’ve never shot a picture in my life; I hate the word. I make pictures. I was interested from the very beginning in whether it was possible to work as an artist making photographs. By 1969, I wanted to try and work as an artist. Photographically, role models were hard to find in those days and trying to make art works with a camera was a very speculative thing to do.
That’s how I have approached the medium from the very beginning, and we are talking 1965, so a long time ago. I fell in love with photography and believed from the beginning it was a fine art form. I pulled back from my other studies in philosophy, history and literature to complete a Fine Art degree and was fortunate to be accepted into the University of New Mexico around the time of the student protests across America, when four students were killed in the Kent State riots in 1969. At my university (UNM) twenty students were shot and wounded, but it never hit the newspapers because the government suppressed the information. At the time it was like going through a crucible; you either want something so badly, and you are willing to pay every kind of emotional and physical price for it, or realise it is not worth the effort and go and do something more interesting. It was so hard, so vicious, both academically and socially. I survived, got lucky and loved it.
You made a manifesto over 30 years ago of only ever making photographic work outdoors, with one negative, one site and one place so each picture is unique. Only land, water, and no representation of the human form. Can you tell me more about the making (and upholding!) of this vow?
Yes, in a way it seems anti-photographic. I learnt on a Leicaflex; beautiful machines and objects and such a great camera to work with but they are about handheld movement and in my opinion are used in relation to ideas of glancing as opposed to gazing, which has always been my primary visual interest. Both are equally interesting but are markedly oppositional in the way of seeing things and presenting those sightings to the world. I was never either smart enough or quick enough to glance. By the time I figured something out, where it was, it had gone! So, I had to work out something else, a way of seeing through a camera. In 1965, I contacted a man who was selling his portrait business in my hometown Arcata, California and it included his 5 by 7 Agfa Ansco field camera made in 1898. I bought the camera there and then. It is the only camera I have ever used for work. I still use it. I took two years learning how to use it up to ‘67 and another two years trying to figure out if I could use it to make my kind of pictures which takes us to ‘69. It was then that I decided I am going to work outdoors because I’m awkward around people. Trees and rocks don’t yell at you very much if you are kind to them.
© Thomas Joshua Cooper, An Indication - See Canyon near San Luis Obispo, California, 2069-70.
I very quickly came to believe, from my childhood background almost certainly, that every place, given the opportunity to understand and comprehend, is unique. Every rural place, every wild place, every urban place, every metropolitan place; if you have the eyes to see. All places are unique. The kind of uniqueness that I was interested in wasn’t the uniqueness that can come from a glancing view. This understanding arrives through gazing. Gazing is a way of passing through time optically consciously, and improvisationally, as opposed to optically and intuitively. I asked myself, can I use this idea of time gazing as a way of approaching photography to indicate the particular uniqueness of a place as I experience it? In essence, this singular approach was very much the opposite of the multiple condition of overt photographic picture making which is primarily concerned with pictorial volume in the moment.
I recall there was a place in central California where I was living and where we bought apples and apple cider from a valley called See Canyon. This name was the beginning of realising how place names call me. I thought this must be a place where I can begin this picture making process that I was considering; one unique place in relation to one unique picture and thought all I need to do is to have this in mind and walk. So armed with a heavy tripod, my old 1898 Agfa field camera and the inevitable pack with water and food, I walked eight tedious miles through the Canyon to the sea and nothing happened, there was nothing! On my way back, I climbed the hill to look back down into this place I had walked through and there at once, I had found the picture; an old cabin, five empty broken windows along the edge of a stream, a group of dying silver weathered trees curving in towards the vacant cabin and this force behind it. I made one picture called An Indication – See Canyon (1969) and I knew absolutely that this was how I would work for the rest of my life.
So, on April Fool’s Day in 1969, I made a vow that I would only ever work outdoors, I would only ever work singularly in relation to singular places and I would take the chance that if I blew it, I wasn’t meant to make the picture. I vowed always to take the time to become acquainted with the place, the site, the area; physically as well as historically and socially and of course emotionally. So, from this time onwards I made only one picture, in one place, a decision I took immediately and have kept to all my working life.
The World’s Edge – The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity (2019) is evocative and vast, spanning over thirty-two years in the making. The series is imbued with a temporal and psychological intensity which resides in the materiality of the photograph itself. Can you tell me about the process of making this work over this length of time?
I originated this project in 1987/8 and it spans almost my working lifetime. Thirty-two years on one thing is firstly, intellectually, and physically dangerous. Intellectually dangerous because if it turns out that the one thing you have worked on is a complete disaster you have screwed yourself forever. It is physically dangerous because it’s so easy to start allowing repetitive experiences that occur during this time to become familiar, and that is visual death. In both instances danger lurks through that time base. Believing in something it is not equals disaster.
I have finally come to understand that I’ve always worked in what I call ‘the field’, but latterly, I have come to understand that I work in two types of fields concurrently. The entire Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity is based in what I call The Far Field; the wild, the uninhabited, often unexplored, rare, and dangerous places. And then there is The Near Field, which is the local, the domestic, the accessible. This is the field of my wife's, Catherine Mooney's Celtic Saints project, Caledonian Desire Lines (2021). Together two projects, one epic and one lyric join psychologically and physically to create a wider unified field of thought, access, and practises. I had found my place – if you will – and learned how to gaze through the camera into these multi sectional fields to make my work.
It no longer mattered how long it required to make the picture. What mattered was that I allowed the time that I required of myself to offer up personal time to try and understand the experiences that were occurring to me in ‘the field’; to first become acquainted with a place, to pay attention, and by most people’s standards slow down, to be very very slow, to be patient, learn from mistakes, and to ask how I could honour this idea of the uniqueness of place. I work sequentially and build pieces of work together to find a larger work, more than just the obvious sum of the visual parts. They then became independent groups that add, or sometimes subtract on purpose from a larger intended total. There is not a lot of randomness, but there is a lot of good luck, inspiration, intuition and most importantly a lot of improvisation, otherwise pictures easily become visually predictable. I learnt from the great jazz and folk musicians, how to play a visual tune over and over until you ‘get what you want out of the tune’ and then learn the tune well enough to play it again and find something new, every single time! To take a quote from the Arte Povera artists, “There is no such thing as old work, there is only new work and newly invented work”.
© Thomas Joshua Cooper, The Swelling of the Sea, the Pentland Firth, Duncansby Head, Caithness, Scotland, 1990.
I started with the circumnavigation of Glasgow with my wife in 1988. We found that it was 490 miles in circumference and that all four cardinal points were in the wilderness, in “the outdoor world” as I describe it. Two years later I asked myself if I could circumnavigate Scotland, which I believed without any nationalism whatsoever, is an island, and thought that I could navigate first in the south across creeks and rivers and then from one edge to the other. I made this group of pictures from the furthest North, South, East, and Western points of mainland Scotland called the Swelling of the Sea (1990).
This set the hook for me. I became hugely fascinated with the ideas of circumnavigation and in particular, the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. His epic journey and first circumnavigation of the globe beginning in 1519 and concluding in 1521, was an event that singularly and consequently changed the entire known world with trade routes which later would evolve as global capitalism. I wondered if I too could journey in this way, go around and about, to and fro. I engaged in a study of the Renaissance explorers and discovered that all the seafaring explorers of that time embarked from the most southwest point of all Europe. A place in Portugal called Cabo São Vicente extending deep into the North Atlantic Ocean, at the bottom edge of Western Europe.
© Thomas Joshua Cooper, “The Door”, The Strait of Gibraltar, Cape Malabata. Morocco, 2003, from the series The World’s Edge – The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity, 2019.
I asked if maybe could something be learned by standing on the furthest cardinal points of North, West, South, and East of all the five continents surrounding the Atlantic Basin, from what I call the Old and Ancient worlds of Europe and Africa, and consider the inventors of western civilization and how civilization came to some kind of renewed consequence in the New Worlds of South and North America. Can I stand with my back to the land, look out towards the sea and imagine the changes, the opportunities, and the challenges? The difficulties and the disasters and sometimes even the wonders? What happens when thought, as well as humans, travel? This is how I started my work on The Atlas.
The great early Greco-Egyptian cartographer and geographer Claudius Ptolemy designated the end of the Ancient World at Punta Dela Orchilla, the Westernmost point of the Southernmost Island of the Canaries, El Hierro, that was an early location point for me. Magellan made a 24-hour vigil at the ancient lighthouse at Cabo São Vicente before his departure. So I too began my project by re-enacting this vigil at this extraordinary site.
Some artists, whose work is made entirely with analogue processes, insist that the completion of their work is at the point of reception, when it is received by the audience, and not as a digital artefact lost in the vagueness of the internet. What are your thoughts of this physical exchange, if you like, as one material form observing another?
Tactility and touch are crucial to my work. It is hard to translate touch through photography as you can see stuff without necessarily feeling it. Touch is about feeling, I think. It changes the mental receptors in a way that pure intellectual comprehension does not. A combination of the optical and the physical; the combination of sight and touch is meant to trigger things. An interesting thing for me about photography, amongst many of its problematic circumstances, is that most people who see a picture that looks believable will consider looking at it, but if it looks somehow artificial or non-believable it becomes something other than this thing that is experienced or witnessed by a person and translatable.
I don’t think of that as experience transfer but as experience translated onwards. So, this idea of how intense I can physically make something that is believable enough to feel translatable is paramount in my artwork. However, it must start with me. So yes, pictures originate when I arrive at a place, when I figure out how to make a picture, when I finally bring the camera to the site, when I make the picture, when I print and when I prepare it for public view, then and only then, at the 6th or 7th stage, when the work is presented in the public domain does the work come alive. Until then it is speculative and ongoing.
© Thomas Joshua Cooper, Uncharted Dangers, – blanketing dense fog, The Bransfield Strait, The Mouth of the Antarctic Sound, looking towards Prime Head, “Catherine Island”, Antarctica 63°12.81’S/57°16.20’W, 2008, from the series The World’s Edge – The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity, 2019.
The adventure, as opposed to the presumption of being an artist, is so exciting. Can you make something believable and interesting and genuine enough to interest somebody who didn’t expect to see it? It must have an absolutely faithful relationship to the artist's intentions and that relationship of course has to be built on surprise. If it’s always the same damn thing it’s just boring, but if the works continue to surprise, then you know that there’s an artist who’s found how to make the work they want, wherever, however, whatever with enough maturity to continue to learn how to do it better and better and better, and over and over and over, without it becoming predictably familiar and dismissible.
Light is seen as both a giver and destroyer of information in your work, a blurring of time, both in its appearance and disappearance. What are your thoughts on this?
The suggestion of both creating and destroying is seen in Indian mythology through the goddess Shiva, her ingress of breath creates, the exhaling destroys. It is both a time of instantaneity and of epochal time. It is a pulse; whether it is tidal or a breath, or geological tectonic formation and destruction, this time-fullness is ever present in everything that I do. It is central to the events or times of life that take place with value and purpose that can’t be easily remarked upon.
Another early body of work called The Fields We Know – A Myth of Recollection (1972) talks about, or at least considers a cycle of something called the Eternal Return, where the idea of a single person who has passed through a moment with whatever purpose at the time, that purposefulness rests within the history of the experience, so it passes continuously on, causally.
© Thomas Joshua Cooper, Blinding Brightness. Yankee Harbour, Greenwich Island, the South Shetland Island, United Kingdom, Antarctica, 62° 32’S, 2008, from the series The World’s Edge – The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity, 2019.
Having experienced The Worlds Edge – The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity (2019), one of my questions is not just related to the physical scale of your hand printed analogue photographs, but also to the scale intoned in the words Emptiness and Extremity – can you expand on your conceptual and phenomenological approach in relation to this?
Eternal Return or a continual return is part of the substantial interest in doing a project that talks about ideas in an Atlas. Therefore, a very particular kind of map of two very particular kinds of words and experiences, Emptiness and Extremity, appear in my Atlas. Where do those things exist, if they exist at all? Because that's the first question: Where do pictures begin to exist physically, or tactically, or visually? To be remarking upon without simply recording their external physical exteriors and saying “this is that”.
How far is any human willing to go and pay the physical, psychological, intellectual, and financial price to pursue an idea, a feeling, experientially? What then is the limit of my capacities and abilities to try and find something out? To learn something I don't know about. I make pictures to consider these elemental questions.
© Thomas Joshua Cooper, Looking back, The Arctic Ocean sea ice, 2007 - 2008 The North Pole, (a two part work) 90° North, from the series The World’s Edge – The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity, 2019.
I produced a structure which suggested that if I could reach the limits of the furthest cardinal points of the continental Atlantic Basin, I could stand on a cliff edge and ask, What does Extremity mean? What happens at an Extremity of an absolute end, which is what all cardinal points are. Is there a space between nothing and something? I have spent a lifetime on that thought, and over three decades trying to particularise it and picture it.
There are extremities in the sea level world or near sea level that are also within the same death zone that climbers experience at high altitude. Mistakes can happen, you can die. It can sound like the word ‘conquest’, like people who 'conquer' Everest. A word I consider vulgar. The physical feat is amazing to be sure, but no, climbers don't do that for the physical bravado. It is something as I understand for the moment they reach the zone, at altitude when oxygen runs out and you still must function, you must go on to the end. There is also the opportunity to stand and make work in easy places, but it is as difficult, in every way.
And we hear the word Emptiness. It has so many layers of possible meanings which can be seen to equate to nothingness but not for me, a result of direct actionable physical witnessable experience – I ask, what happens to the End? What is the End? If Emptiness exists, What can it be? Where is it? How can it be described? I try to respond to those questions in my work and translate these experiences into experiential picture making. I want my pictures to be as tactile and physical as possible. Seamless as if they were always there. My pictures don’t tell anyone about any particular place except for my profound reaction to it.
The Celtic Irish Saint, St.Brendan the Navigator, whose voyages into the unknown, of pilgrimage and wayfaring is the inspiration and departure point for Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity (2019). He is referenced again in your recent work Caledonian Desire Lines (2021). I am interested in your thoughts of folding back time, to wander in the experiential mapping of temporalities.
Something happens in that space; I believe in nothingness and something. I have come to the conclusion, through the very lyrical pictures of my wife’s Caledonian Saints (2021) project that there is a way to talk about the experience of Emptiness and Extremity in intimate terms, through lyricism, which I feel this work does in a wild and abandoned way. And there is an epic and monumental level to talk about the same ideas that are in The Atlas. The recognition, and it is different every time, if it occurs at all, is that there is space that is physical and psychological at the end of Extremity that is comprehensible. It is very immaterial. It is not a rock or a tree, or a body of water. It is the very stuff that surrounds all these things often at the edge of extremities and surprisingly felt in very domesticated places. I chase that surprise each time, but the minute I presume to actually know about it, the game is up. I have to be absolutely open at all times to improvisation and reconsideration in order to make my pictures.
© Thomas Joshua Cooper, Saint Marion of Glen Strathfarrar, forgotten feast day, Kilmorack, Inverness-shire, from the series Caledonian Desire Lines, 2021.
When I go to a place, a name called me, a site called me. I would read all the maps, the histories and yet, the place would always change me. I no longer know anything there for sure, as everything has been the result of going openly, through every possible time-of-day and night and asking, Can I make a picture here? Everybody has been lost at some point, but there are types of unfamiliarity that are so physically and emotionally overwhelming in extremis that they are without traditional vocabulary. The willingness to dislodge all presumptions here is crucial to the need to be respectful and open to the uniqueness of place. What I am left with is to try and make a picture; something happens in this space of nothingness and something-ness. In this place there is always a picture waiting for me to discover and make.
I have a maxim when making pictures, which is to “locate the edges and the centre will take care of itself!” The picture builds as a performative event which is consequently spontaneous with the time that I make the picture. I expose not for objects but for the time of various water and visual movements, taking into consideration the underwater topography and the over water wind relationship to the surface, and then, I expose for weather, a time of the mark making. I wait and count and count and count to try and see what those movements allow to describe my relationship with the site. In Simply Counting Waves (1994), I learnt how to watch water during its time of movement both before and after its apparent physical motion, in relation to the weather phenomenon, and working in the circumstances of trying to understand the weight of the presence of light as it passes both down and across and over. Different and simultaneous sensing and seeing, a directional opportunity to include remarks about Extremity.
What are your thoughts on the re-reading of The World’s Edge - The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity (2019) which could be viewed as a commentary of the human effect on the environment in light of potential sea rise and climate change?
I would be a liar if I said I started out with this in mind. Climate in one elongated experience, as with anything you can see, changes. You can see in your local weather critically how climate changes. It gets colder, hotter, drier and we notice these things but to layer consequences on those notices takes something else.
The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World is, in my opinion, the most important atlas ever made, most accurate and thorough. The greatest English atlas and the atlas upon which all other atlases are based. Just around the year 2000, I was discussing my Atlas of Extremity and Emptiness with the chief cartographer at HarperCollins, the publisher of the Times Atlas. He noted that although I might not be the first person to attempt this circumnavigation, I almost certainly will be the last, as almost all cartographic remarks are done by satellite and almost no-one goes directly into the field any more. Given his learned experience, he remarked that the world was changing and that climate change, although I don’t recall him using that phrase, was human-based and unstoppable. His prediction was that in thirty-five years’ time 85% percent of coastline on the five continents on the Atlantic Basin could be under water and the traditional map as we know it would be gone forever.
© Thomas Joshua Cooper, The Swelling of the Sea, Furthest West - the Atlantic Ocean Point Ardnamurchan, the West most point of mainland Great Britain, 1990 - 2001.
That information gave me greater urgency to fulfil the project, as these places are unique and they are, really disappearing. The project is a project of witness and there is no-one in the world but myself that has done this so entirely across the farthest edges of the Atlantic Basin. The circumference of the Atlantic Basin is approx. 70,000 miles. I have gone around all of it except the last high Arctic Eastern Canadian region of 1200 miles. I tried for five years to complete this and failed. I was really upset about this, it's incomplete, but it is finished. A friend of mine said “perhaps incompleteness is a poetic virtue”, that thought helps.
Your pictures can be seen to perform history and cease to be a linear representation of events. The writing reveals memories, histories, weather and locates the work. Can you tell us about the relationship of words and images in the titles of your work?
The texts are like a report, it’s like saying ‘During a Full Moon near the West most point of Africa I was here; Cape Manuel looking West’. It seemed important to me that if I was going to make an Atlas, that place names of every land point and water, county or province, state and country, date and time and weather conditions were accurate. This practical and interpretational information states ‘these events caused me to make this picture’. From the beginning, I felt that I absolutely owed place the necessity of full acknowledgement.
© Thomas Joshua Cooper, Very near the Arctic Circle, The North Atlantic Ocean, PistilWarargrunn, Looking towards the Old Lands, Hraunhfnartangi, Melrukkaslé, Norður-Þingeyjarsýsla, Nordurland, Eystra, Iceland, 2007-2008 The North-most point of Iceland, 66°33.087’N from the series The World’s Edge – The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity, 2019.
The world called me, the names called me, places like Bay of God's Mercy, before this, places in Europe, like the most western point of the province in Southern Spain, 80 kilometres west of Santiago is the Cape of Finisterre – The End of the World! There was a Finisterre at the Western point in France and weirdly, there is a Finisterre in Ireland so the End of the World! Wow! That interests me! Of course, it is mythological, so is absolutely not the case, but I have been chasing this idea of the End of the World – Where is it? How is it? How do I experience this? Can I picture it well enough to honour it?
Part of the demand of text, as opposed to titles, is to locate the precise physical geographical positioning. I am a witness: this is the location of where this improvisation, this picture was made. You can go exactly there but you will never see my pictures. The pictures are interpretations, and inventions. There is an historical accuracy as the places aren’t invented; the invention is the picturing. Given the Caledonian Saints’ pictures, I realise that I am making a different kind of atlas in miniature. It feels wonderful. The guidance of my wife, it has to be said, helped me make another kind of picture. These new pictures are true. The lessons of learning as a picture maker appear to be unstoppable, it is exciting. I am 75 years old; I am just beginning to learn how to make pictures again and it is thrilling!