LACMA Afterschool: Thomas Joshua Cooper
In August this year I started working with LACMA as a teaching artist. For my first program, I led workshops for one of the after school classes. I guided fifth graders through an inquiry based discussion and drawing activity in Thomas Joshua Cooper: The World's Edge and then we created artworks inspired by what we saw.
Thomas Joshua Cooper's large-scale, black-and-white photographs are often realized through intense physical travel to remote and isolated sites across the world. The exhibition, 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, 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 coordinate. Using a 19th-century Agfa Ansco view camera, his singular exposure of each site includes neither a horizon line nor the terrain below his feet.
Students considered the ideas behind Coopers work and learned how he chose locations for and created his photographs. They made high contrast foam plate prints that represented their interpretation of "the world's edge".
“Terra incognita, going beyond the space in maps, well, that’s what I do,” “But actually that’s what each of us does. You cross the street in L.A. and you’ve gone beyond the known in a map, and that interests me. Each of us has an edge. It’s sometimes physical, it’s sometimes emotional, it’s sometimes intellectual.”
—Thomas Joshua Cooper
