Featured Photographer: John F. Cooper's "Organic Portraits"
This feature by Michael Behlen was originally published in Edition 1 of Analog Forever Magazine
John F. Cooper is a New York-based fine art and commercial photographer whose work spans a wide variety of industries and genres. A photographer his whole life, he knew from a young age that he would pursue the craft of image-making and has made it his lifelong pursuit. He began tackling the discipline early on, capturing important events within his family with his first camera, a Kodak Instamatic. As he grew into his passion he began to make images for his high school’s paper and yearbook, while shooting for local news outlets. A true self-starter, he converted his families’ bathroom tub into his home darkroom and processed his first rolls of film there from underneath the safelight he installed there. Even today, he still recalls how captivated he was by the magic of watching an image slowly appear in the developer tray until an amber light.
Cooper didn’t stop shooting photography when he graduated high school. After obtaining his BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology, he went on to intern at the George Eastman House, the world's oldest museum dedicated to photography and one of the world's oldest film archives, which opened to the public in 1949 in Rochester, New York. After his internship there he made his way to becoming an in-house photographer for a large Swiss pharmaceutical company, which he did for two years before starting his own freelance photography business. Though initially, most of his clients were from the healthcare industry, Cooper slowly began to excel in combining his creative and professional talents as he began shooting for music labels such as Windham Hill, Blue Note, La Face, BMI, and RCA, among others. Though most of these commercial jobs were taken from the perspective of ensuring his clients’ needs and wants were met, he always tried to merge his creative side with his work when possible. He shared with us that, “The perfect commercial shoot should be a hybrid of artistic and commercial sensibilities”.
Over the course of his career Cooper has amassed an impressive who-who’s list of commercial clients including BMW, De Beers, and Johnson and Johnson while his editorial work has appeared in industry-leading magazines such as GQ, Rolling Stone, Seventeen, and Vogue among others. If his professional career wasn’t impressive enough, his personal creative work has also attracted a large following. His work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally and can be found in publications ranging from Polaroid Anthology: Emerging Bodies: Nudes from the Polaroid Collection, the anthologies Nude York and Sensual Images, and the book Clear-cut: The Tragedy of Industrial Forestry. He also received numerous fellowships and awards including the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship. While pursuing his own work he also made time to share his knowledge about the advertising industry by spending two years in the 1990s at Seton Hall University as an adjunct professor for a class called Advertising Photography at the undergrad level.
During this time, Cooper was doing well financially and wanted to expand his personal work and embarked to create a series of images that was personal and artistic that would also bring awareness to and support a cause bigger than himself. His assistant at the time was Brazilian and talked about the plight of rainforests in his home country which sparked the series we now know as Organic Portraits. What started off as a simple concept has since become a magnificent testament to what one man can do given enough time, assistance, and determination.
Created over a decade in collaboration with nearly 100 models, fashion designers, backdrop painters, and studios—and all the talent inherent to those ingenious people, his series was a labor of a community of artists that shows that if individuals work together that can accomplish tremendous feats. It’s amazing to realize that even though Cooper is a talented and accomplished photographer, even he needed to band together with fellow creatives to accomplish such a meaningful visual opus.
This process of creating Organic Portraits has a direct correlation with the type of action needed to safeguard and sustain the ecosystems around the world that are in dire conditions. In the 1950s, about 15 percent of Earth’s landmass was covered with (oxygen-generating and carbon-dioxide storing) rainforests. As of today, fewer than 70 percent of those forests remain. If the human race as a whole doesn’t come together as a whole to begin work on saving our rainforests — the lungs of our Earth—we won’t have the opportunity to create bodies of artwork representing the action we need to take, and ultimately, we won’t have the luxury of viewing photographic work as beautiful Cooper’s due to the lack of desire to save ourselves.
The resulting body of work transcends traditional portraiture with a timeless aesthetic that imparts viewers with a deep appreciation of human kinds intertwined relationship with mother nature. Predominantly created using expired 4x5 Polaroid, this deeply personal series reflects Cooper’s dedication to his craft. From the beginning, Cooper set out to produce a body of work that would create awareness - and help preserve - the world’s dying rainforest by producing photographs featuring models against classic and simple backdrops and incorporating natural elements into the model's hair to create unique hair sculptures. The resulting images allow the viewer to dive deep into the deeply sensual and honest geography of the human body that has been allowed to thrive on our planet, in a large part, due to the generous amount of resources the world’s rainforests have provided us. Most of the images represented in Organic Portraits were created on large-format cameras and exposed on large-format Polaroid films, which are both no longer produced and becoming extinct; it’s eerily prophetic that the very medium used to create a series of images intended to preserve the world's rainforests is now, itself, no longer.
Cooper’s series was eventually published as a photo book in 2015 via a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised thousands of dollars for the Rain Forest Action Network. We are proud to present to our readers a selection of these images and hope that you will find inspiration in the beauty presented that will motivate you to take similar action in working towards something larger than yourself. Before you see them all, connect with John F. Cooper on his Website and Instagram!
GALLERY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Behlen is an instant film addict and the founder and publisher of Analog Forever Magazine. For the last 6 years, Behlen has become an obsessive community organizer in the film photography world, including launching the independent publishing projects PRYME Magazine and PRYME Editions, two enterprises dedicated to the art of instant film. Through these endeavors, he has featured and published 200+ artists from around the globe via his print and online publications.
He has self-published two Polaroid photobooks -“Searching for Stillness, Vol. 1” and “I Was a Pioneer,” literally a boxed set of his instant film work. His latest book, Searching for Stillness Vol II was published in 2020 by Static Age. He has been published, been interviewed, and been reviewed in a quantity of magazines and online publications, from F-Stop and Blur Magazine to the Analog Talk Podcast. He loves the magic sensuality of instant film: its saturated, surreal colors; the unpredictability of the medium; it’s addictive qualities as you watch it develop. He spends his time shooting instant film and backpacking in the California wilderness, usually a combination of the two.
Connect with Michael Behlen on his Website and on Instagram!
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