In exploring the almost overwhelming theme of "beauty" – indeed, how does one define beauty? – Cooper employs techniques that recall the work of 19^th - and early-20^th century photographers. His work is layered with an antique quality that, in part, obscures the contemporaneity and modernity of his images. What he has produced in these three series of images – Botanicals, The Almagest, and The Altis – is a sense of timelessness: the timelessness of true beauty.

In a telephone conversation with Martin Cooper on August 8, 2000, I posed a series of questions that I believed needed to be answered in order to fully understand his work and his working process. I believe that no artist functions in a vacuum, and Cooper’s life and career have been subject to multiple possible artistic influences. His education in the world of fashion design, and his constant exposure to the visual world must naturally carry some influence over his work. What follows is an edited version of our conversation, and I hope that it helps to shed some light on the photographs in this exhibition – images that are not only a tribute to beauty in their subject matter, but also in their high level of technical accomplishment.

William B. Bodine, Jr.
Deputy Director and Chief Curator|
Columbia Museum of Art

MC: My first experience with the camera was probably with my father. He had a beautiful 35mm Contax camera he bought when he lived in Japan.. I remember him trying so hard to teach me about shutter speed and aperture ratios. It was such a hard concept to really grasp…you know, measurements for light. "How does one measure light?" It was an unobtainable concept for me. I would say that was my first experience with the "camera".

My first experience with "photography" was introduced to me indirectly by my father as well. When I was a kid, my two older brothers and I had the responsibility of cleaning his office [Cooper’s father, Dr. Noble Cooper, is a Columbia dentist]. I loved the weeks when I had to clean the reception room, because I really spent more time reading the magazines and looking at images than cleaning. I would say much of my visual language was laid down in that reception room through LIFE magazine and National Geographic. I learned there were people living in other places that had different customs and I was very curious to learn how they lived. These magazines were more a learning tool and travel machine for me than anything else. Even today, I read about 30 magazines a month.

MC: Well fashion magazines were an extension to yet another world. I looked at photographers like Cecil Beaton, Horst P. Horst, George Hurrell, and George Hoyningen-Huene. They were the style-makers that defined modern fashion photography, but I was actually looking at the clothes they photographed, not the photographs themselves. It took me some time to put the two together. That happened much later. From the beginning though, I was really fascinated with beauty. It’s a Virgo thing. It eventually led me to become a clothing designer.

MC: Honestly, I think it’s a culmination of all my experiences, and fashion happens to be just one of them. Some of my "fashion" skills or craftiness of hand comes into my work because I make all my own props and I know instinctually how to style the shot. It’s using the same references I’ve built over the years to create new language. I’m at a point in my design career where I’m finding inspiration from those things outside my industry. Today what fascinates me more are things like dance. It’s such a unique expression… one that I’m just beginning to understand. It’s very complex, but looks so simple, and has a parallel, I think, to the way I put a collection together or a photographic series. All the elements of design are the same. Exactly the same. Especially the repetition of phrases or themes to build language. By this, I mean there’s a certain structure to creating. Fashion has taught me about structure & the importance of being stylistically consistent. I approach photographing a series with the very same stylistic discipline that I use to design my collection. So I feel that my most direct influence from fashion, however, is really not from the creative end, but the organizational side. In my business as a designer there is no such thing as "writer’s block". I am trained and paid to be creative on command. I’m extremely thankful for this skill and odds are I will be prolific, as an artist, because of it.

MC: I must be disciplined! There are no two ways around it. And both processes [fashion design & photography] run like clockwork. In order for me to be successful in both of those areas of my life, it has to be. I believe an individual can have "parallel careers", and for me, the survival of mine has been due greatly in part to organization. I also work with supportive individuals at the office who understand its importance in my life. My life as an artist enriches my career as a designer and vice- versa. I think they understand this ebb and flow.

MC: No. But people often mistake the concept of beauty for "fashion" or "decoration". They cannot distinguish differences.

MC: I’m interested in working with universal icons… things that have a common thread regardless of culture. I think the Olympic games fall into that genre, even though its roots are based in antiquity. These elements define us as human beings. Mythology and storytelling play a big part in that for me.

Sometimes the birth of a project is quite by accident, like The Altis. When I started the project it had no ‘apparent’ focus. It was a series of portraits that began as an ode to an old friend. Karen, my wife, commented that the images had an "Olympian" feeling to them, and I realized there was more to the project than I originally had thought and I dove into the research.

The Almagest is actually a sub-series to a larger one entitled, The Mythic Image. I like the concept of a series within a series, like chapters in a large book. The Mythic Image is an on-going body of work that mostly explores allegory, my representation of icons or emotions through the use of the nude. With The Almagest, the universal icon is the zodiac. I always inject imagery, references or symbolism ‘only for the initiates’. For example I portray Taurus as the love affair between Europa and the Bull [Zeus]. Libra, the scales, depicts the story in ancient Egyptian mythology that when you die and are trying to gain passage into the afterlife, Anubis, the jackal god of the dead, places your heart on the balance scale against . . . a feather. In order to gain passage, your heart [symbolizing one’s soul] must weigh less than a feather. It’s really a beautiful story, but moreover it reflects an image that goes far beyond what you see at first glance. So even though the signs of the zodiac have been with us since before antiquity, I’m interested in translating other icons like this into the figurative, but in a way we’ve never seen before.

MC: Many, both directly and indirectly. Directly, I would say the American photographers Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Edward Curtis. Lots of Edward’s it seems, right? (laugh). Aristide Maillol, the French sculptor… the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Lawrence Alma- Tadema, who was totally awesome! He’s the one person who I would like to come back as in another life. All of these men were consummate portraitists and masters of their craft. I admire them for that. I also love Curtis for who he was as a person. He dedicated his entire life to documenting and photographing the North American Indian.. Also, anything about antiquity, mostly Greek though.

I am also influenced today by indirect things: the young choreographer Kevin O’Day, who’s a contemporary of mine. Victorian painting... the Art Deco painter Jean Dupas… my image references are one big menagerie. Bill, this conversation could go forever…"

MC: "Hopefully up. (laughs) It’s funny when I look back at my career as an artist, I feel it’s taken me all those years, and to have had all those experiences to be where I am today. I feel my career is just beginning to blossom. I think I will explore less concrete ideas in the future, but will always use the human form to express those ideas. I hope to continue producing images that help re-define the tradition of the genre."