Mark Richard Cooper

I was born in Carlisle and brought up in Keswick in the Lake District, Northern England.
After living in London for several years and having travelled extensively doing photographic reportage, I settled in Piedmont, in the wine region of Northern Italy, where I've lived since 1993.

From a very young age I was encouraged to interpret my world through my camera lens, and that's precisely what I've done for over 35 years of my artistic career. A journey that has taken me through doing reportage photography in the Middle East and Northern Africa, to spending many years hanging out of a helicopter specialising in aerial photography of the landscape, then back down to Earth in a kind of “free fall” doing Macro photography, and on into the next dimension with my new creations.
Over these years, analogical photography gave way to the digital era, opening up new horizons and new techniques, a period that coincided with my friendship with a great Italian photography critic “Ando Gilardi” - historian of photography and founder member of the Italian National Photography Library, a free thinker and forerunner of Italian digital Art. Who guided me into going beyond the flat surface of the printed image, into discovering new dimensions that...

I can't boast of any real Academic training of such, I create through necessity, to communicate and share my visions with others through my personal way of observing the world that surrounds me, every day I receive a new education and a new stimulus to create.