Thomas Joshua Cooper lecture

Tonight, I went to a lecture by Thomas Joshua Cooper, the artist whose exhibition I visited a few weeks ago.

This was a long, rambling lecture, with slides. It included a lot of TJC's work and also people he considers to be influential.

TJC's work is the kind of landscape photography that interests me. It's not the chocolate box, National Trust style that can be found in photography magazines, and that which adorns corporate office calendars. There is something else at work - looking at specific detail rather than the wide vista, and concerns of texture, and of time and space.

TJC was evidently very nervous & self-deprecating, which helps to endear him to me. But a lot of what he said clearly has significance to him, or perhaps a certain kind of audience, which the people present may constitute (the audience was quite clearly a Bourgeois one). For that reason, I tended to feel ill at ease.

But it was worth coming along to. Now I need to get hold of his (relatively expensive) books at some point in the future...