Edge is Everything is a love letter to photography and to the art of truly seeing.

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For over thirty years, Thomas Joshua Cooper has photographed the furthest edges of land with a 19th century camera  marking the  sacred points of departure from which ancient way-finders left one world in search of another. The result is a body of work that charts the entire 70,000 mile circumference of the Atlantic Ocean basin, bearing witness to landscapes transformed by climate change and recovering forgotten histories.

Cooper draws on his Native American heritage and an extraordinary archive of audio interviews he recorded in the 1970s with photography’s most influential figures, including Ansel Adams, Man Ray, Imogen Cunningham and Paul Strand. These previously unheard tapes create a rare intergenerational conversation about photography and artistic practice.

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In time, his own life began to echo the journeys he was documenting. His pursuit of the world’s edges and of meaning through photography carried him repeatedly far from the life and family he left behind.

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Now eighty and living in Glasgow, Cooper looks back at his life and work, and the choices that shaped them both. Alongside him, his wife and adult daughter offer another perspective, revealing the emotional cost of his long absences and the sacrifices that made such an artistic life possible. Their courageous contribution complicates the romantic image of the solitary artist, reminding us that no artist creates alone — and that the price of great work is sometimes paid by those who remain at home.

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Edge is Everything asks what might happen if we slowed down long enough to fully observe. This question has guided Cooper since childhood, when he was taught by his Native American elders: “Each of us has an eye that sees and a seeing eye. When you learn which is which, you will have begun to become human.”