This is Columbus Point on the isle of Tobago, one of the many places around the world that the American-born photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper has visited over the past 30 years.
The only artist to have ever made photographs of the two poles, Cooper, who now lives in Glasgow and is Professor and Researcher in Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art, has visited five continents (North and South America, Europe, Africa and Antarctica) in search of images of the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.
It is a quest for the remote, the unknown, the unseen, one perfectly summed up in the title of his Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition The World’s Edge – The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity, which opens today at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
The Caribbean Sea, Columbus Point, Saint Patrick County, the South-Most Point of the Isle of Tobago, the Lesser Antilles, 2005, © Thomas Joshua Cooper. The World’s Edge – The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity opens today at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh and continues until January 23, 2022.
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