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Romania’s Imaginary Gypsies

“I came to be an artistsimply by taking pictures”

Barbara Cole

16 May 2004 Photo Life

by Gary Michael Dault

The Art of Barbara ColeP h o t o - I m m e r s i o n

Like Alfred Tennyson’s Ulysses, who states: “I am a part of all thatI have met”, so too is photographer Barbara Cole—and she hastaken her camera with her. As well, the remarkable assurance andauthority of her work has been generated from the extraordinarytrajectory of her career in image-making.

Everything began early and abruptly for Cole. Andeverything that happened to her contributed a good deal

to the artist she was to become.

She was modelling, for example, when she was still ateenager. And although she dropped out of high school ingrade twelve, she found herself, virtually overnight,transported from a temporary job as a secretary to—remar-

kably—the position of fashion editor for the Toronto Sun.This was in 1972.

The position became an intense, hectic, protracted, hands-onphotography course for a woman who, at this time, was stillonly nineteen years old. “I came to be an artist simply bytaking pictures”, Cole told me recently, and indeed whatbetter way is there? Newspaper staff photographers

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Incognito

17May 2004Photo Life

apparently dislike doing fashion shoots, Cole assured me (itseems you couldn’t win awards that way), and so, in theToronto Sun’s then non-unionized shop, Cole undertook themherself, learning as she went. The recalcitrant staffphotographers seemed happy enough to teach her darkroomtechniques, and within a couple of years she was creatingfashion layouts for the paper, writing articles, and, moreimportantly, travelling the globe, taking runway photos inParis, New York and everywhere else the momentaryurgencies of fashion beckoned. “I was sent around the world”,Cole says, “to do things I didn’t have a clue how to do!”

Methinks, however, that she doth protest too much. Herfashion work of that time is remarkably centered andpoised—it looks as fresh and vital today as when it was done.Perhaps more important to her subsequent career, however, isthe fact that wherever she was on assignment, Cole invariablytook the time to look around and make photographs for theirown sake. A photo she made about this time, in the late1970s, of carousel horses in a Paris park (“…unlike a fashion

photograph, there was nobody at all in this picture…”) ran, infact, on the cover of Photo Life magazine.

“I came to be an artist simply bytaking pictures”, Cole told merecently, and indeed whatbetter way is there? News-paper staff photographers apparently dislike doing fashionshoots, Cole assured me (itseems you couldn’t win awardsthat way), and so, in the TorontoSun’s then non-unionized shop,Cole undertook them herself,learning as she went.

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Flutter Kick


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Vanities


Cole was with the Toronto Sun for a decade. Then, during asabbatical from the paper, in 1985, she began to put togetherher very first photographic exhibition for Toronto’s JaneCorkin Gallery. And the rest, as they say, is history. Or,perhaps more precisely, art history.

Cole exhibited with Corkin for ten years (she seems to dothings by decade), after which she showed for a while withthe Mira Godard Gallery in Toronto. It was at this time thatshe worked on the opulent Painted Ladies series (1993-94).

The series was born, technically, from Cole’s love of whatshe has referred to as the “rich colours and milky palette”attainable with Polaroid film, a system she first assayed in1987, but subsequently found too formally limiting. Sheeventually returned to it though, after discovering ways toadapt the instant camera to the imperatives of her studiolighting and, as is discernible in the lushness of suchphotographs as In Repose (1994) and Without Pretense(1995), after finding ways to manipulate the images so as toimpose a painterly quality to each photograph. The series

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In Repose


began, in fact, with Cole’s having been much taken, in 1993,by a fleshly, starkly rendered nude by British artist LucienFreud.

There is too little room here to trace Cole’s progress minutelyor even adequately through the several bodies of work thatclaimed her attention during the very productive late 1990s.Her frequent travelling took her, as might be expected, toEngland, France and Germany and, as might not have beenexpected, to India, Bali, Taiwan, and a dizzying number ofother places, always with her camera at the ready (theextremely luscious Places photos are culled from these

journeys). An opportunity arose for going to Israel in the fallof 1996. This journey resulted in a handsome suite of golden,buttery photographic vignettes of life in Jerusalem, suffusedsomehow with the glow of the stones of the Old City. Theseimages were mostly realized in her studio after her returnwhere, Cole says, she could properly bridge her romantic,self-generated abyss between “the imagined and the reality” ofthe venerable city.

As if in deliberate high contrast to her peripatetic, globe-trotting photography, Cole then returned to her rootsin Toronto; a voyage home that began with a portrait of her

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Without Pretense Body Betrayed

Getting Lost Greeting Dawn


There is too little room hereto trace Cole’s progressminutely or even adequatelythrough the several bodiesof work that claimed herattention during the veryproductive late 1990s.

the photographs is derived from their having been hybridizedfrom a melding of hand-manipulated Polaroid SX-70 film andsubsequent modification within the computer. The fluid,transformative nature of the images (“Rock strata merges intobones, soil melts into flesh…”) is thus the product of anequally fluid, transformative process of making.

96-year-old grandmother, Rose Cole, in June of 1995. “Maybeit was the reminiscing [with her grandmother], or a renewedbond with my home and upbringing in Toronto”, Cole haswritten, “but the portrait sitting was all I needed to begin mymeandering around the city.” Her meandering became soabsorbing, in fact, that she became untraceable for a while,both by her agent and by various art directors who wereseeking her services. The harvesting of photographs fromwhat became the Toronto series, occupied her for the wholeyear. Other series followed in quick succession, herexceedingly lyrical Human/Nature series (1998-2000)becoming both the most aesthetically and technicallyambitious of them.

Formally mysterious and suffused with a strange lambent lightthese otherworldly photographs derive some of their halluci-natory charm from the fact that their content was born from amarriage of “the past with the future”, a rather elaborateprogram by which landscapes taken abroad (often inEngland) are then “populated” later by the use of imagesgenerated within her Toronto studio. The composite nature of

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Chair Study Folding Dreams

Passenger #1


The viscous, evanescent nature of much of Cole’s photographic imagery, from the distancing effect of the Placesworks, which seem to locate their subjects in the middleground of memory through her Distortions photographs,which she apparently made without any knowledge of AndreKertesz’s famous essays in that direction, to the destabilizing,metamorphic nature of the Human/Nature series, was clearly becoming central to her way of making photographs.This came to a majestic fruition in the extraordinaryUnderworld works.

Begun as an extrapolation of Cole’s fascination with the“calm and soothing nature of water” and born of her desire

to “explore the sensation of looking at water from the insideout”, the Underworld photographs were conceived onesummer as she sat by the edge of her pool (Cole has alwaysbeen a strong swimmer, and has been swimming since hertwenties). It was not long before she found herself immersedin the project—literally, swimming alongside her models witha 35-mm camera, photographing them from above, the side,and below. At one point, she strapped a ten-pound weight toher stomach so that she could handily sink to the bottom ofthe pool and lie there looking up, calmly taking light readings and focusing. This is how those astonishing views ofthe world, from beneath the water, were made: photographssuch as Melting Sky, Surface Tension and Five Feet Under.

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Mid Way


There was never any employment of scuba gear. “Whyshould I have been more comfortable than my models?” Coleonce asked me.

“I can hold my breath for a long time”, Cole admits. Evidentlyso. For the most remarkable characteristics of theseoutrageously beautiful photographs are their balletic grace(see, for example, the magical Enigma) and a strange sense oftimelessness that informs each of them; qualities unavailableto a photographer in a hurry and under pressure.

And their balletic grace goes hand in hand with a stirringsense of the archetypal, the long arcing questions the

photographs ask of cultural history. Indeed, it seems almostinevitable that, no matter how apparently contemporary themodel may appear in any of them (the lipstick anddécolletage of the swimmer in Deep Breathing, for example,or the candy-striped miniskirt ballooning around the modelin Dry Cleaning, or the segmented, film-frame-like animationof photographs such as Jet Lag, Mermaid, and Girl

“Why should I have beenmore comfortable than mymodels?”

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The Girls


Interrupted), we are never far from an inescapablyMediterranean sense of antique classicism (note the model’sstrong resemblance, in the noble Incognito, to the WingedVictory of Samothrace in the Louvre). Also archetypal are thestirrings within us, that innate understanding we all possess,of the primary condition of water: water, the giver of life andits destroyer, water as amniotic fluid, as the fecund sea, thenourishing formlessness out of which form is born. Andbecause a number of the models in Cole’s Underworldphotographs (even the title is much more pointedly mythicthan, say, “Underwater” would have been) are clad—nay,draped—in fluid, filmy, ethereal garments that both cling tothe model’s form and accentuate it and, at the same time,swirl and eddy round the body like the water itself, themodels change, under the impress of Barbara Cole’ssensibility, into water sprites, naiads, mermaids, sub-aqueousgoddesses. Sometimes this metamorphosis, this acceleratingetherealization, transforms the subjects utterly. In abreathtaking work like Shiver, for example, the model hasbecome a pillar of light.

BioGary Michael Dault is a Toronto-based writer and art critic. Mr.Dault writes a weekly gallery review column in the Globe & Mailand has written widely for arts publications in Canada andabroad. Contact him at [email protected].

Barbara Cole’s Underworld willbe on exhibit at the CanadianEmbassy in Washington D.C.June 8th-August 27th 2004.To view more of her work,go to www.barbaracole.comor www.randycole.com.You can e-mail Barbaraat [email protected].

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