I’m thinking of the time I was in the country, in the company of the photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper - and we weren’t playing a round of golf. We were passing through a forest festooned with boulders when Cooper said, ‘Have you heard that Buddhist saying: to the man with no knowledge, trees are just trees and rocks are just rocks. Yet to the man with a little knowledge, trees are much more than just trees, and rocks are never just rocks - both are invested with a spiritual significance. But to the man with complete knowledge, trees are just trees and rocks are just rocks?’ Funny thing for him to have said: Tom Cooper’s spent the best part of the last 40 years photographing nothing but trees and rocks.
