Unveiled - Humboldt Magazine - Humboldt State University

© THOMAS JOSHUA COOPER
Thomas Joshua Cooper (‘69), a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, traveled to the Arctic Circle to take “Looking towards the Old Lands.”
To the Edge and Back Guggenheim Recipient Documents Extreme Places
IF LLOYD’S OF LONDON, the British company
that famously insured Betty Grable’s
legs for $250,000, won’t touch your boat
because your journey has been deemed
too insanely dangerous, then you know
you’re in for tough times.
For Thomas Joshua Cooper, his photography
work means accepting those
risks and pushing forward to document
some of the world’s most unforgiving locations
along the Atlantic basin. Whether
he travels through forests or deserts, getting
to coastal waters is always difficult,
none as much as his three-month journey
to Antarctica’s Prime Head.
“The weather was astonishingly unforgiving
and also lethally dangerous.
We got there and brought back a wonderful
set of pictures, and when we finally
got back to safety at one of the island
research stations one of the scientists asks
where we’ve been. We tell him and the
guy laughs and says, 'Can you prove it'
My captain was deeply offended; there were
four of us on that boat for three months at
sea, and in that kind of weather it was like
being in solitary confinement. We showed
him the chart path and the guy says you do
realize that more people have stood on the
face of the moon than have stood on Prime
Head Point. It’s that hard to get to.”
For Cooper the work became a lesson
in the brutal reality of Earth’s most
extreme places.
“It’s been an education in humility for
me. I thought foolishly that since they’re
so easy to see in big atlases, it just seemed
so simple. It was just astonishingly difficult
but also deeply rewarding.”
Cooper (’69 Art, Secondary Education)
has been awarded a Guggenheim
Fellowship for his Atlantic basin project,
which takes the photographer to the
“beginnings of civilization” surrounding
the Atlantic Ocean. In addition to being
incredibly hard to get to, the locations
Cooper visits offer him first-hand affirmation
of the effects of climate change.
“The great idea of the permanence of
the north is changing in our time,” says
Cooper. “Despite everyone’s opinion about
it, I’ve been in places that verify that the
Earth is changing and we made it do that.”
During his time at Humboldt State
Cooper studied under Professor Thomas
Knight, who founded the fine art photography
program at HSU in the 1950s.
Cooper credits Knight, along with all the
faculty in the Art Department, with helping
him develop his personal aesthetic.
“The early and founding members of
HSU’s extraordinary Art Department were
all wonderful, exceptional and inspirational
teachers to me. The professors
were profound in their positive effect in
bringing both the requirements for the
craft and the purpose of an artist fully
and clearly into my youthful and not very
experienced life at the time,” says Cooper.
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