THE Scottish National Portrait Gallery is defining the word “portraiture” with a pleasing liberality these days. Its recently opened exhibition of new paintings by Alison Watt, titled A Portrait Without Likeness, depicts a series of objects, without any direct reference to the human or animal form.
Its latest show, The World’s Edge, by photographer and Professor in Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art Thomas Joshua Cooper, portrays a series of locations at the extremities of the Atlantic Ocean. Shot entirely in black and white, Cooper’s pictures allow no people (and, for that matter, no fauna) to distract us from the timeless remoteness of these places from blithely prosaic human existence.
As Liege is evacuated, Vancouver records its highest temperatures on record, and the subway system in Zhengzhou, China is flooded, we must, surely, now be convinced that climate chaos is not a future threat, but a present reality. Cooper’s remarkable photographs offer a chastening counter narrative to the hubris of supposed human mastery over nature.
Since he began his extraordinary journey in 1987, the photographer’s travels around the edge of the Atlantic have taken him to the furthest points (known by geographers as the cardinal points) of the ocean in Antarctica, South America, North America, Africa and Europe. It is a sobering truth that each of the cardinal points Cooper has photographed is forecast to be under water by 2055, as a consequence of the climate crisis.
The decision to work in black and white is as crucial to Cooper’s work as it is to the monochrome images of the great Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. However, where Salgado (that awe-inspiring chronicler of modern humanity, the animal kingdom and sublime landscapes) places an emphasis on panoramic spectacle, the Cooper photographs here tend to bring us into closer proximity with the timeless, elemental power of the Atlantic’s continental edge.
One might refer to a strand in Cooper’s work as micro-geography. Take, for example, the image titled The Door.
Photographed at North Africa’s closest point to Europe, at the busy maritime thoroughfare that is the Strait of Gibraltar, the image contains no sign of human life, or, even, human activity. Instead, it depicts an edge of the Atlantic as seemingly remote as any in the polar regions.
The aptly titled picture Wild And Bewildered depicts the eye of a swirling pool of water in the ocean, as seen from a point in the state of Pernambuco, Brazil. As with many photographs in this exhibition, the picture’s particularity of the focus (with no horizon in sight) combines with both the shutter speed and the monochrome to create an image that is semi-abstract, almost ethereal.
The effect is reminiscent, not such much of the work of other photographers, as of the quasi-impressionistic representation of the forces of nature, especially the sea, in the paintings of Turner. Indeed, although there is an impressive diversity to this collection, there is a sense in which it is characterised, first-and-foremost, by what one might call a Turneresque elementalism.
Nowhere is that rendered more powerfully than in a small series of Cooper’s pictures from the Arctic and Antarctica. One image, Whiteout, is consumed entirely in the whiteness of the scene.
The piece is whiter, in fact, than the Russian constructivist Malevich’s famous painting White On White. As such, it is a gloriously bold picture, being simultaneously an accurate depiction of nature and a work of abstract photography.
All in all, this is a remarkable journey around both the outer edge of the Atlantic Ocean and the brilliant aesthetic imagination of a truly significant artist.
The exhibition runs until January 23, 2022: nationalgalleries.org
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