For thirty-two years, Thomas Joshua Cooper has been working on a project that he calls “The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity,” a collection of some seven hundred black-and-white photographs that he makes from remote, forbidding, largely unpeopled, all-but-forgotten outcroppings, on five continents and at both poles, along the perimeter of the Atlantic basin. He sets his camera in places with names like Cape Frigid on the Frozen Strait, the Lighthouse at the End of the World, Finisterre—places infused with human awe of the unknown and with the yearning of explorers embarking on a journey from which they will likely not return. “I thought maybe I could learn something by standing on the continental edges of the source of Western civilization and trying to imagine, with my back to the land, what happened when the carriers of the culture went over the edge of the map,” he told me. Another time, he said, “Emptiness and extremity are what I was searching for, with the firm belief that it’d kill me or transform me.”

Part Cherokee and part Jewish, Cooper was born in California and has lived in Scotland since the nineteen-eighties. In images that are romantic and psychologically severe—the angular grandeur of rock and the terror of the ocean, befuddled by clouds, fog, and breaking waves—the “Atlas” documents an exile’s search for home. He looks for what he calls “indications”—rocks or wave patterns that form arrows, pointing him in the right direction—and avoids horizons, preferring pictures from which there is no clear escape. “He is part of the conceptual-art tradition of artists traversing space to create sculpture,” Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and a champion of Cooper’s since the early nineties, told me. “He is also one of our greatest formal photographers. He captures the motion of the environment, which is near-impossible to do.” In late September, the “Atlas” had its début, at LACMA, in an exhibition called “The World’s Edge.” At Cooper’s request, the show opened on the five-hundredth anniversary of Magellan’s departure for his trip around the globe.

In Cooper’s photographic epic about exploration, colonization, migration, and homecoming, he is both narrator and protagonist. “In making the Atlas pictures, I may unintentionally become the first person in the world to circumnavigate the boundless coastal perimeter of land-surfaces harbouring the entire Atlantic Ocean,” he has written. He says that a senior cartographer of the “Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World” once told him that he was the first to see many of these places and, because of global sea rise, would likely be the last. “In the life of your children, most of those edges will be underwater,” he told me.

Seventy-three, tall and lumbering, with fair hair turned white and a goaty scruff of beard, Cooper is a kisser of hands, who calls both men and women “sir.” Like a kindly adult out of Roald Dahl, he’s often enthused to the point of inarticulacy. People he admires are “absolute gobsmackers.” He expresses happiness with rapid claps; moved, he thumps his chest with a closed fist; when truly overwhelmed, he says, “Fu-u-u-u-uck.” From the outset, Cooper was unfit for the physically arduous task he assigned himself, which requires that he spend months at sea in small craft, hurl himself from dinghies onto slick rock faces, inch along cliffs, dangle over abysses. He has fallen into quicksand; tumbled from peaks; sailed into a cyclone; been shot at, searched, and detained; had his dinghy swamped among hunting leopard seals. “I get seasick,” Cooper told me. “I’m frightened of water—I can’t stand this shit. In fact, I don’t really know how to swim. I swim like a rock.” He is blind in his right eye, and his glasses fog. In books, which he publishes upon completing segments of his itinerary, he thanks the chiropractors who help patch him together at the journey’s end. He thought the “Atlas” would take seven years; it has taken more than four times that long.

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Mentally, though, Cooper is unflinching. “I’m an invisible person, never had an audience,” he told me. His work, when it has been seen at all, has mostly been displayed in small galleries and group shows. “But I’m unstoppable,” he said. “I can’t do anything but make things.” In setting the parameters of his project, Cooper made a series of vows: to work exclusively outdoors, to make only a single exposure in each place, and to pursue his vision at the expense of all else. “It wasn’t melodramatic,” he told me. “It allowed me to realize that, whatever it cost me to get to a place, I was willing to pay the price. If I said to myself, ‘I am already dead,’ then I had nothing to worry about. I’m free. I no longer have any fears. Only the joy, the peculiar kind of ecstatic joy of making things at the point where nothing else is left.”

“I trespass whenever possible,” Cooper told me, walking by a “No Trespassing” sign and approaching a rusty, broken-down barbed-wire fence. It was a sunny morning, on a palisade overlooking the Pacific, part of a twenty-five-thousand-acre ranch at Point Conception, in Santa Barbara County. As a coda to the “Atlas,” Cooper had decided to make a series of photographs along the coast where he was born, on a three-week road trip between Oregon and Tijuana. (The Pacific pictures will be exhibited at Hauser & Wirth, in Los Angeles, in late October.)

Cooper clutched his camera, wrapped in a dark cloth, as he stiffly traversed the fence. His wife, Kate Mooney, who has practical gray hair and a deflationary wit, choreographed. She researches and helps plan Cooper’s voyages, and serves as a living compass for her directionally challenged mate. “Right foot, right foot, left foot, over,” she said. “The next piece of barbed wire, and then over again. Well done.” He walked down a path to the eroded edge of the cliff. The ocean below was marbled like a steak. A train whistled in the distance, and Cooper turned to wave. “Heart-beat, heart-beat, heart-beat,” he said.

Cooper’s camera, a five-by-seven-inch field camera, is a wooden box that was built in 1898. He refers to it as his “baby” and says, “She and I are going to go into the fire together.” In recent years, the materials required for the “Atlas” have become increasingly scarce. He has bought the last of the film developer that he prefers, the last of the fixer, and the last of the paper. “Analog photography’s disappearing,” the artist Richard Learoyd, who uses a homemade camera obscura, told me. “You have to change and adapt to that. He doesn’t adapt.”

Cooper refers to his camera, a wooden box made in 1898, as his “baby.” At times, protecting it has threatened to kill him. Photograph by John Francis Peters for The New Yorker

Working with an old, unwieldy instrument slows Cooper down, which is a primary intention of his process. Awkward, fragile, heavy (the rig, including tripod and film, weighs some sixty pounds), the camera has been lugged to the literal ends of the earth. “There are areas in South America where they see me with the camera and tripod and they say, ‘Oh, you’re the Yank that does the impossible shit,’ ” he told me. Made from nineteenth-century wood, the camera is particularly vulnerable to the influence of salt water. More than once, protecting it has threatened to kill him. I have the distinct impression that this is how he’d like to go. “Death or picture,” he likes to say.