LONDON.- For over thirty years Thomas Joshua Cooper has made landscape photographs in some of the most remote and isolated locations around the world. This exhibition brings together over twenty photographs, many not seen in public before, that showcase rare works from the beginning of his career.

Thomas Joshua Cooper has been a figurehead for British fine art photography since the 1970s as both a practicing artist and within the field of art education. In 1973 Cooper was invited to teach at Nottingham Trent Polytechnic, and was instrumental in it becoming an important centre for landscape photography. Cooper worked in the Midlands for the next six years, making works in the quarries and forests and on the moors of Derbyshire and Shropshire, where he made some of the early works that are the focus of this display.

The works in Messages are selected to also tell the story of who has influenced and inspired his work. Cooper suggests that the artist is always, in some way, in dialogue with both peers and precursors when making their work, something that he characterises as an ‘ongoing conversation’. The works in the exhibition make this explicit by including the subtitle, ‘Message to…’ and include artists such as Richard Serra, Robert Frank and Timothy O’Sullivan and also the great Japanese haiku poets Basho and Issa.

The photographs in the exhibition range from the past thirty years and are made in diverse geographical locations including the UK, California, Derbyshire, Tokyo and Provence.

Thomas Joshua Cooper, (1946) 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.

Contemporary art gallery Haunch of Venison supports and presents the work of some of today’s leading artists, presenting a broad and critically acclaimed program of exhibitions to a large public through international exhibition spaces in London and New York. Haunch of Venison was founded in 2002 and named after the London courtyard in which the gallery space is based. Key international artists the gallery works with include Ahmed Alsoudani, Rina Banajee, Enrico Castellani, Nathan Coley, Leon Ferrari, Bill Fontana, Jitish Kallat, Richard Long, Justin Mortimer, Katie Paterson, Giuseppe Penone, Patricia Piccinini, Chiharu Shiota, Jamie Shovlin, Eve Sussman, Gunther Uecker, Joana Vasconcelos, Tom Wesselmann, and Uwe Wittwer.