Thomas Joshua Cooper FRSE (born December 19, 1946) is an American photographer. [1] He is considered among the premier contemporary landscape photographers. [2]
Thomas Joshua Cooper | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 19, 1946 |
| Education | Humboldt State University, University of New Mexico |
| Known for | Photography |
Cooper studied art, philosophy and literature and received his bachelor's degree from Humboldt State University in Arcata, California in 1969. [3] In 1972, he received his master's of art in photography with honors from the University of New Mexico. [4] [5]
Cooper was inspired by the works of the photographers of the f/64 group of the 1930s and 1940s, such as Ansel Adams. Cooper stated, "I'll live and die by the late works of Edward Weston, Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, and I think Robert Frank is the most extraordinary living photographic picture-maker." [6] [7]
Cooper's first solo show took place in 1971. He has had more than 95 solo exhibitions since then. [3] [8] After teaching art and photography in a number of schools in California, Cooper moved to England. [5]
In 1982 he launched the Fine Art Photography programme at the Glasgow School of Art. [3] He is now retired.
Cooper loves being a photographer, but is frustrated by some of the vocabulary that is used in the field. He indicates, "I hate the words "snap", "shoot" and "take" when it comes to making photographs. Everything I do is very seriously built up. They are 'made' pictures." [6]
Not only a photographer, Cooper is a poet and has written haiku books.[ citation needed ] Most of them are inspired by nature and reflect his photography. [9]
In 2009 Cooper achieved a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography. [10]
Cooper has lived in Scotland since the 1980s [1] and he is represented by Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland. [7]
At the end of September, 2019, on the 500th anniversary of the beginning of Magellan's circumnavigation of the world, Cooper opened for the first time "The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity," at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: In an exhibition called 'The World's Edge' [1] comprising 65 large-scale and 75 8 x 10 black-and-white photographs, showcases Cooper's The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity, The World's Edge, and The Atlantic Basin Project, which he first embarked upon in 1987, to chart the Atlantic Basin from the extreme points of each north, south, east, and west coordinates. Open from 21 September until 2 February 2020 in the Resnick Pavilion. [11]
Cooper's works are held by over fifty [16] museums and public collections, among them: [2]
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Diane Arbus was an American photographer. She photographed a wide range of subjects including strippers, carnival performers, nudists, people with dwarfism, children, mothers, couples, elderly people, and middle-class families. She photographed her subjects in familiar settings: their homes, on the street, in the workplace, in the park. "She is noted for expanding notions of acceptable subject matter and violates canons of the appropriate distance between photographer and subject. By befriending, not objectifying her subjects, she was able to capture in her work a rare psychological intensity." In his 2003 New York Times Magazine article, "Arbus Reconsidered", Arthur Lubow states, "She was fascinated by people who were visibly creating their own identities—cross-dressers, nudists, sideshow performers, tattooed men, the nouveaux riches, the movie-star fans—and by those who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security or comfort." Michael Kimmelman writes in his review of the exhibition Diane Arbus Revelations, that her work "transformed the art of photography ". Arbus's imagery helped to normalize marginalized groups and highlight the importance of proper representation of all people.
Robert Michael Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits, and still-life images. His most controversial works documented and examined the gay male BDSM subculture of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Uta Barth is a contemporary German-American photographer whose work addresses themes such as perception, optical illusion and non-place. Her early work emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s, "inverting the notion of background and foreground" in photography and bringing awareness to a viewer's attention to visual information with in the photographic frame. Her work is as much about vision and perception as it is about the failure to see, the faith humans place in the mechanics of perception, and the precarious nature of perceptual habits. Barth's says this about her art practice: “The question for me always is how can I make you aware of your own looking, instead of losing your attention to thoughts about what it is that you are looking at." She has been honored with two National Endowments of the Arts fellowships, was a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004‑05, and was a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. Barth lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Catherine Sue Opie is an American fine art photographer and educator. She lives and works in Los Angeles, as a professor of photography at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Andreas Gursky is a German photographer and professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany.
Joel Sternfeld is an American fine-art photographer and educator known for his large-format color pictures of contemporary American life and identity. His work contributed to the establishment of color photography as a respected artistic medium. Sternfeld’s photography follows in the tradition of American photographers such as Walker Evans and Robert Frank, documenting people and places with sensitivity. His work often conveys a sense of beauty and melancholy, capturing moments of hope, despair, and tenderness. Since the publication of his landmark book American Prospects in 1987, Sternfeld’s photography has intertwined conceptual and political themes, reflecting his engagement with history, landscape theory, and the passage of time.
Henry Wessel was an American photographer and educator. He made "obdurately spare and often wry black-and-white pictures of vernacular scenes in the American West".
Hannah Wilke (born Arlene Hannah Butter; was an American painter, sculptor, photographer, video artist and performance artist. Her work is known for exploring issues of feminism, sexuality and femininity.
Judy Fiskin is an American artist working in photography and video, and a member of the art school faculty at California Institute of the Arts. Her videos have been screened in the Documentary Fortnight series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; her photographs have been shown at MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, at The New Museum in New York City, and at the Pompidou Center in Paris.
Rineke Dijkstra HonFRPS is a Dutch photographer. She lives and works in Amsterdam. Dijkstra has been awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society, the 1999 Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize and the 2017 Hasselblad Award.
Jim Goldberg is an American artist and photographer, whose work reflects long-term, in-depth collaborations with neglected, ignored, or otherwise outside-the-mainstream populations.
Miyako Ishiuchi, is a Japanese photographer.
Michal Rovner, also known as Michal Rovner Hammer, is an Israeli contemporary artist, she is known for her video, photo, and cinema artwork. Rovner is internationally known with exhibitions at major museums, including the Louvre (2011) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2002).
Charlotte Cotton is a curator of and writer about photography.
Richard Learoyd is a British contemporary artist and photographer.
Mark Ruwedel is an American landscape photographer and educator.
Anthony Lepore is an American artist working in photography and sculpture.
Neil Winokur is an American photographer based in New York City. Winokur's work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Michal Chelbin is an Israeli photographer. Her work is held in the collections of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; Metropolitan Museum, New York; LACMA; Getty Center, LA; and the Jewish Museum, New York.
Mimi Plumb, also known as Mimi Plumb-Chambers, is an American photographer and educator, living in Berkeley, California. Plumb is part of a long tradition of socially engaged documentary photographers concerned with California. She has published three books, Landfall (2018), The White Sky (2020), and The Golden City (2021).
