Sea pictures

This morning I was reading about the photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper in a book called Making Contemporary Art: how today's artists think and work, by Linda Weintraub, a heavy book with a plastic cover and modern layout (often the lines are too long for comfortable reading, but sometimes they're made shorter by a side column with someone's interview with the artist) - and pages at the end of articles that are full, simply, of grids. However the contents are enlightening and DO live up to the book's subtitle.

My first encounter with Cooper's photographs was at a mixed exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery about a dozen years ago. I happened to be there when he was giving a talk, but can remember nothing that he said. Should have taken notes....

Cooper's artistic journey culminates in photographs of the sea, and includes the historical, geographical, sensual, and cosmological dimensions. Googling his name brings up lots of images - here's one: <http://www.source.ie/issues/issues0120/issue14/is14cootho02.html>. You can identify the sensual dimension and get a hint of the cosmological by looking at it, but for the historical and geographical dimensions you have to know his working process. He identifies a location, usually associated with a historical event - for example, the place where the Pilgrim Fathers would have had their last view of England as they sailed for America - then travels there with his 1898 field camera, which weighs 60 pounds. He takes one picture, relying on developed intuition to get the exposure right, then spends hours in the darkroom perfecting the photo.

His studio consists of several rooms - an office with 5000 or 6000 books and 2000 maps; a small room with a slide table above a chest of pictures; a small studio area for putting the work together; a room specifically for proofs; and a darkroom "where everything I do happens".

To take the photographs, he subjects himself to risks and danger, perching at the very edge of clifftops or on rocks, waiting for the the tide to come in - "the inspirational benefits he derives from fear". And makes just one exposure: another risk.

But first there is an "elaborate process of identifying, locating, and researching a transforming instant in the annals of history - the precise moment when historic conscious opened to new vistas." Lengthy titles identify the location and incident. (Should a work of art need a title to make sense? Or does the title add a further layer of resonance?)

What struck me most of all was Cooper's attitude to the sky. "I don't give a damn about the sky. It does not have history embedded in it...My work is 99 percent activated by human history. That is why it is so important to me to exclude the sky. My images are horizonless. I'm interestedin the interiorization of viewing and living space. Take away the navigational aid of the horizon, and you creat a different psychological construct."

And from the last paragraph of the article: "A bit of shoreline resonates forever with the force of a deed enacted upon it ... Cooper's photographs layer spiritual guidance upon human history, and history upon nature."