In the summer of 2003, Thomas Joshua Cooper traveled to Shoshone Falls in southern Idaho, where the Snake River drops roughly 212 feet across a broad precipice. His project was a response to an earlier encounter with the same site: Timothy H. O’Sullivan photographed Shoshone Falls in 1868 and again in 1874, while serving as photographer on the geological and geographic surveys of the American West led by Clarence King and George M. Wheeler. Radius Books gathers the two bodies of work in one volume, reproducing Cooper’s photographs in tri-tone alongside O’Sullivan’s albumen prints, so that a reader moves between a nineteenth-century survey view and a contemporary response to the same landscape.
The pairing invites comparison rather than asserting equivalence. Cooper’s photographs engage his predecessor while extending his own formal vocabulary, and the publisher records that he works with a single 1898 Agfa field camera, making one exposure of each view he chooses. That discipline gives his contribution a deliberative, cumulative weight, reinforced by the large-scale tri-tone printing. O’Sullivan’s images carry the concerns of survey photography, where landscape was bound up with exploration, geology, and national expansion; Cooper’s carry a contemporary attention to the medium and to the history embedded in the site. Set together, the falls become a point of exchange between two photographic moments separated by well over a century.
An essay by Toby Jurovics, curator of photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., contextualizes both photographers and examines Cooper’s practice among contemporary landscape photographers. The book itself is a hardbound volume with jacket, 48 pages, published by Radius Books.
For a collector, the interest is specific and structural. This is not a survey of western landscape photography but a concentrated case: two photographers, one site, and an essay that reads them against each other. The combination of Cooper’s single-exposure method, O’Sullivan’s albumen prints, and Jurovics’s contextual essay makes the volume a compact study of how landscape photography carries memory and method forward.
