Draft:Chip Cooper

Chip Cooper is an American photographer best known for his color photographs of the American South and Cuba. Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, compared his style to American artist Georgia O’Keeffe His photographs of Cuba have been called "dreamy and atmospheric."

Early life and education
Chip Cooper was raised in Huntsville, Alabama. He studied photography at the University of Alabama. Upon graduation in 1972, he began working as a staff photographer for the University of Alabama.

Career
Cooper served as Director of Photography for the University of Alabama for thirty-three years. In 2014 he was Artist in Residence in the Honors College.

Cooper has published photographs in several national publications, including Horizon Magazine of the Arts, Antique Monthly, Antiques & Fine Arts Magazine, Newsweek, Village Voice, USA Today, Modern Maturity, Northeast Orient Magazine, Alabama Heritage, Sophisticated Traveler—the New York Times, Mercedes International, Veranda, and Southern Accents. His photography has been featured in several books and numerous exhibits worldwide, including The South By Its Photographers.

The South
Cooper published Hunting: The Southern Tradition in 1987. In 1989, Alabama Memories: Chip Cooper Photographs featured 200 full-color photographs of the lesser-known places and surviving structures in Alabama. Silent in the Land, published in 1993, won the Award of Excellence from Communication Arts magazine for its depictions of Southern architecture. In 2000, Cooper collaborated with storyteller and frequent contributor to NPR's "All Things Considered," Kathryn Tucker Windham in Common Threads: Photographs and Stories from the South. In 2009, Cooper photographed folk artist Charlie Lucas for Charlie Lucas: Tin Man.

Cuba
In 2003, Cooper visited Cuba for the first time and made several subsequent trips. In 2008, Dr. Eusebio Leal, Historian of Havana, invited him to work with his photographer, Nestor Marti, to document the restoration of Old Havana. Old Havana, La Habana Vieja: Spirit of the Living City was published in 2012. Cooper later worked with Cuban photographer Julio Larramendi to photograph the campesinos, the farmers, all over Cuba. The photographers traveled 15,000 miles to 550 locations in three and a half years. The collaboration with Larramendi resulted in an exhibition at the Vatican in 2015 and later a book, Campesinos: Inside the Soul of Cuba.

Working again with Larramendi, Cooper photographed and published in 2018 Common Ground: Photographs of Havana and Mobile: Sister Cities, a 25th Year Tribute. The images were exhibited at the Mobile Museum of Art in Mobile, Alabama, and later the Cuban Embassy in Washington, D.C. In 2024, Mobile and Havana: Sisters Across the Gulf will be published.

In 2014, Cooper received an Artist in Residence from the Fototeca de Cuba for the City of Havana. Honoring his fifteen years of photographing Cuba, Cooper was awarded in 2017 the Distinguished Chair of Vernacular Architecture of Havana.

Books and exhibition catalogs

 * Lamar, May, Rich Donnell, Chip Cooper. Hunting: The Southern Tradition. Dallas, TX: Taylor Publishing Company, 1987. ISBN 978-0878335367
 * Warner, Jack, Maridith Walker, Chip Cooper. Alabama Memories: Chip Cooper Photographs, New York, New York: Gallery Books, 1989. ISBN 978-0831702007
 * Knopke, Harry, Robert Gamble, Chip Cooper. Silent in the Land. Tuscaloosa, AL: CKM Press, 1993. ISBN 978-0963671301
 * Windham, Kathryn Tucker, Chip Cooper. Common Threads: Photographs and Stories from the South, Tuscaloosa, AL: CKM Press, L.L.C., 2000. ISBN 978-0963671318
 * Windham, Ben, Chip Cooper. Charlie Lucas: Tin Man, Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0817316815
 * Marti, Nestor, Eusebio Leal Spengler, Robert F. Olin, Magda Resik Aguirre, Philip D. Beidler, Chip Cooper. Old Havana: Spirit of the Living City, Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0817317621
 * Bonzalez, Reynaldo, Robert Stevens, Julio Larramendi, Chip Cooper, et al. Campesinos: Inside the Soul of Cuba, Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0817319502
 * Elkin, Elizabeth M., John S. Sledge, Chip Cooper, Julio Larramendi. Common Ground: Photographs of Havana and Mobile, Sister Cities, a 25th Year Tribute. Mobile, AL: Mobile Museum of Art, 2018.
 * Sledge, John S., Alicia E. Garcia-Santana, Chip Cooper, Julio Angel Larramendi. Mobile and Havana: Sisters Across the Gulf. Ciudad de Guatemala, Guatemala: Ediciones Polymita, Distributed by the University of Alabama Press, April 2024.