Thomas Joshua Cooper (b 1946, USA) has travelled to some of the most isolated and far-flung locations across the globe, for the past 30 years, in order to create images using his 100 year-old Agfa camera and specially made photographic plates. Through an attention to the resonances of place, each work demands patient attention by the viewer to the contour and context of landscape, in its overwhelming natural similitude, and inevitable emplaced particularity.

Each work begins as a location found on a map, researched and tracked down, before the picture is made. Each site, the subject of a single frame. Composing only and always outdoors, Cooper describes his commitment to method, "I have worked in the landscape since 1969, when I made a vow to do nothing else. I walked eight miles up ... See Canyon in central California, got to its end, found and made a picture; which I consider my first real picture." Yet, his photographs are not documents, records of a voyage; he does not take his pictures, but 'finds' them, 'makes' them. Devoid of figures and animals, Cooper's images do not even evidence the residue of human contact, aiming instead towards an imaging of transcendence, of time within place. The compelling tableaux invest themselves in the intricate shapes of entwined tree branches, the unique identity of a wave, the velveteen flow of water, or visceral geology of rock formations; they are the texture of place, enabled through the artist's use of a chiaroscuro technique - the use of deep, dramatic, and highly contrasting variations of light and shade in an image - and the effect of his antique silver prints, layered in accentuating selenium and gold chloride.

In his most recent exhibition at Haunch of Venison, London (2004), 'point of no return', Cooper presented the first portion of an epic series, which began for him in the early 1990s. 'The World's Edge - The Atlantic Basin Project' seeks to map the extremities of land and islands that surround the Atlantic Ocean, beginning with Europe and Africa, as the artist ventures, both physically and visually, from 'North of 80 degrees - Looking towards the Furthest North, Europe - The North Polar Sea' (2004) made at the Svalbard Archipelago in Norway to 'Furthest West - the Mid-Atlantic Ocean' (2004) composed at Cape Verde Peninsula, in Senegal, to 'Furthest South - The Indian Ocean - High Tide' (2004) found at Cape Agulhas in South Africa. However, moving from the Old world to the new, this first part of an epic adventure, Cooper's works also seek to outline the memory of the landscape in a global history marked by the fruits and pitfalls of globalization. 'At the World’s Edge - Southwest-most - Looking towards the New World - the North Atlantic Ocean' marks the starting point of Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe; 'Sea Fog - the Mouth of the River Quadalquivir - the Mid-North Atlantic Ocean' memorializes the commencement of Columbus's 1492 journey into the unknown: points of no return.

Thomas Joshua Cooper, born in San Francisco, has lived in Scotland for the past twenty years, where he is Professor of Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art. During this time he has founded the only fine art photography course in the UK. Cooper has held over fifty solo exhibitions since 1971 across Europe and America, including in 2001, an exhibition at Tate St. Ives, and more recently, an exhibition at Haunch of Venison, London (2004), followed by exhibitions in 2005 at the Galerie Judin, Zurich, the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester, and Casa das Mudas Centro das Artes, Madeira. His work can be found in public and private collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Arts Council of England, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.