Barbara Cole on Creating Timeless Images

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Artolog. Today I'm chatting with Barbara Cole. Barbara is a fine art photographer working in several photograph Barbara is a fine art photographer working in several photographic mediums, including underwater photography and modernized wet collodion. She was born in Toronto in 1953. Her work is noted for its ethereal imagery depicting figures in various states of weightlessness, transformation, and self-actualization. As an innovator in her field, Cole's use of traditional and inventive techniques are part of her ongoing search for timelessness. She's held numerous exhibitions across North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and her work has been extensively commissioned internationally for corporate collections. She's exhibited in both the Canadian Embassy. She's also exhibited in the Canadian Embassies in both Tokyo and Washington, D.C. Barbara, welcome to the Artologue. Thanks, Madison. Happy to be here.

What are your earliest memories of art? Oddly enough, I my aunt was an actress and she passed away many years ago, but she was a very well-known Canadian. Her name was Toby Robbins. And we used to go to plays at Stratford or wherever. And so my first connection with art was through acting, through stage sets in that community. So it wasn't going to museums. And I never considered my career in the arts. I always thought I would be doing something else. It never dawned on me that I could do that because I never felt I could draw well enough. And I figured if you can't draw, you can't be an artist. When I got involved in photography many years later, the pivotal moment for me was looking at a picture, a book by Sarah Moon. And she's a British artist. And she showed me that you can paint with the camera, you can tell stories with the camera. And that got me up and running. And to this day, she's still an inspiration. So 45 years later. But her images were simple but told a very human story. And I loved the way she told it and showed me that maybe I could pursue that kind of photography too. And it took a very long time for me to accumulate the skills to be able to throw that type of conversation out into the world, making it look easy and hurtless. Because until you feel like the camera is part of your hand, you don't feel like just an extension of your body. You're not able to think as freely as you would if you were worrying about f-stops and lighting and that sort of thing. So at this point, I feel very confident in what I want, what I don't want, how I want to say it, and what elements I want to involve myself in. I know how I feel best telling a story.

So you received no formal training as a photographer, and you began your career writing about fashion. Can you tell me about how you developed as a photographer?

I had to drop out of high school because of depression and modeled to pass the time until September when I was planning to go back to school. And the fashion editor at a newly formed paper that's now very well known called The Toronto Sun hired me at 17 to be their fashion editor. And I was quickly thrown into this crazy world that I knew nothing about journalism. I had no training. I liked clothes, but I didn't know the designers. But when I was modeling for her, I was throwing out designer names and making myself the authority on all things. She thought I knew a lot more than I did. So within the first week of the job, I was sent to London and to Paris to cover the collections. And I did that for 10 years, twice a year. But what happened is I quickly realized that I was much better at photography than I was at writing. And the photographers at The Sun couldn't really, they didn't see fashion as important because they were all about getting awards for spot news photography and that sort of thing. So they really didn't, they wanted me to take it off their hands, insofar as they even got me a set of cameras, lenses, etc. And the dark group people welcomed me in there. So I learned on the job within about two years, I was fully into photography in order to get free film. I ended up shooting Sunshine Boys. Actually, I was the one that did it. I was they the first one that did it because they were all shooting Sunshine Girls, and I wanted to be able to get whatever film I wanted to. I hadn't thought about that in years. So I started out just and it was black and white, and I had access to, like I said, cameras, film, and they had a studio as well. I just wanted to learn. And right from the beginning, I was storytelling. I would use, for example, there was a there was one fashion spread I did on bathing suits, and I would go to the library at the sun and get all these. Well, I got pictures of the Titanic, which is macabre. But I used black and white pictures of the Titanic, and the models were in the studio holding their nose and jumping as if we were leaving the ship. And then I combined them. I think we just cut pasted at that time, and then I hand painted the pictures with Marshall's photo oil. So I was always doing, I did a raincoat story, and I made these prints, and then I put drops of water all over the prints, and then I re-photographed that print. So I was always looking for just a different way of telling a story and really loved it, really enjoyed it. And little by little I was starting to develop a store, an eye, and a style. And after 10 years at the Sun, I was given a sabbatical of about three months to do whatever I wanted. And I did my very first show, hand-painted, colored photographs that was exhibited at the Jane Forton Gallery back in 1985. And I was off and running. Is what I would have wanted that very first show to be like had I had all the tools. So the first show that I did, I took models to locations in Toronto. I brought a generator and ran lights off the generator, and it was super complicated. It was nice, but I felt it was very static. And the last show that I will show next year is called Whispers. And in it's refleeing feeling of people in situations, but it's in black and white film, and it's done in an easy and more relaxed way in studio. But it's very similar, and it's done on film, and it's very similar to the process that I've always gone to. And when you start, you don't really know why you're saying something, you just know you have to say something. I don't like to examine it too much, but I was surprised at how close this was to something I was doing 40 years ago, but just doing it differently.

Within your practice right now, you're kind of returning to film. Which do you prefer, film or digital?

I feel a great love of film because that's that reminds me of some very nice signs. Digital has its place, and and now, and actually, I went back in time about 14, 15 years ago, to the tintype, and that was really alt film. It was large format, and I was it was called Wet Collodion. I mixed my own film and uh poured it on glass plates, and then I'd scan it digitally and then retouch it or paint it. So I was doing that for quite a long time, and now I would say my practice is I take the best of both. That's amazing how I am working on a new project, and you know, I'm looking for reference of body language because I always love to, I love the gesture. And the gesture is so hard to come by. You shoot it and then you look, you go, no, that's actually that looks forced. That doesn't say what I want to say. So I'm doing, I'm in the research stage now, and I found these beautiful gestures, but I don't to print out like a capture, a screen capture of someone else's work because it really bothers me. I feel like I can't do my own thing with it. So I use Chat GPT and I said, make a charcoal sketch of this, and out it came. So there's the digital, but then the actual show is two and a quarter film, and it's um it's going to be scanned and then digitized. I love both because they free you up, right? I wouldn't say if I had a preference, I'd say film. I am a film person, I love color film, I love black and white film. The last show I did, I actually my assistant gave me 20-year-old Polaroids that I used to use for proofing when I was working for my day. And what we did is we shot a wall and peeled them apart, and the black emulsion was what I shot. And then I made a mask and threw that on top of the latest film. So it was a digital image with a black and white Polaroid on top, and it's like a real mishmash, but it gives you a lot of tools to use to say things creatively. The more tools you have, the more you can explore, the more fun you can have. So I use both, and I have to say I do not pure digital color picture. And in fact, when the sun back in the day stopped using black and white, told me I had to shoot color, I really was upset because I hated color film. And I was on a blind date with a man who was to become my husband, and I was meeting him at a cafe and told him that about this, that I just didn't want to shoot color and I couldn't. And on our second date, he bought uh Johannes Itman's hardcover book called The Theory of Color or the Concepts of Color, something like the elements of color. And I couldn't believe that this guy had listened to me and not only listened to me, but bought me a hardcover reference. So I knew he was the one. But yeah, I've always had trouble with color.

This is nothing new. Broadly speaking, what do you think makes a good photo?

It's something you look at and go, you feel it in your body, you see it with your eyes, but you actually feel it in your gut. And when I'm doing a show and I'm making pictures, occasionally I will like just jump up from the computer and go, oh my god, that's it. I wish I could do it more often, but I'm very happy for the few times that I felt it. And a good photograph makes you do that. You just feel it, it just has everything. It's got the emotion, it has the balance between background and foreground. It's got the color palette that works, it visually looks balanced, and you just know it's real and it's honest. All those things, you don't know it at the time, you're not going out to make something like that, but when it happens, you know it. And when it doesn't happen, you know it too. So I edit my work now. Very, it's a very slim collection after a show, because yeah, you can like all of them, and you'll go, yeah, all this fits in the story. But I print it out and I put it on the ground and I go immediately, okay. Here are eight pictures, and you can fill it if you want with more, but just try and stick with the eight. But you do know, you get a feeling, you know, just like a writer would writing a poem or a novel, they'd say, I think it's a B plus, or I really love this work.

Same sort of thing. Speaking of shows, you have one wrapping up at Bogie right now called Impermanence. Can you tell me a bit about this body of work?

Yes, I shoot both in the studio and underwater, have done underwater for 25 years, and every underwater show is different. I look at it and try and create something brand new and fresh. This time, what I created, I've never done a black and white underwater show. Usually they're colorful, and that's what I'm known for. But I've been shooting with this two and a quarter Roleflex, which is a twin lens reflex camera where one lens takes the picture and one lens you can see the picture. And so you know the person is blinking or not blinking because that shutter doesn't close. And it's um, and I've been working with it, playing around with it for about five years now, and I felt it was time to do something with it. And I love the idea of shooting film and black and white. So unfortunately, I could not put this antique camera underwater. There's no housing, and yes, you can put it in a bag, but do you want to risk it? No, I don't think so. I ended up shooting through the water, standing in the shallow end and pointing down to the figures in the water. And the figures are women, and I create the costumes because that's my history. I'm a fashion editor, and I can buy things, but they get ruined. I can't return them. And if I'm buying them, I might as well work with a young designer and get my vision for that. And it's clearer and it's really fun. And the designers love it too because they have the freedom of being able to create something for a body work that's going to work. When I was shooting this, though, I had it, it looked like rain, and I had a big tent over myself in the camera. And it was the day of that, I don't remember, but two summers ago. Do you remember that? Huge, like it was like a deluge, and it lasted for five hours on my first day of shooting. And I was watching the water level in the pool rise, and it nearly went over the coping. It was five hours. We actually had to stay in the white tent because the water was forcing the roof of the tent down. So we had to every couple of seconds with a broom just get the water off the roof. So we ordered the pizza, and the water was over the hot tub. So the model got to stay in the hot tub and eat lunch and whatever. So it was quite an adventure. But the other of the other days of the shoot, my testing went fine, and the other days of the shoot, the weather cleared, but that was a really difficult beginning for that series. And again, it's about how nothing is static and how people are constantly moving through their lives. And I always love the blur and the slowness of time that I can capture. And these it's just everybody wants things to be just, and I like to catch the moment in between. And so that show is all about that. What draws you to water? Oh, good question. I love water, I swim for exercise, not in the winter. It's just a natural for me. I used to race in high school, backstroke. I just I'm not an active person, but I loved swimming. And I got involved in the swim team. And when I had migraines in my 20s, really bad ones, and the doctor said you should swim. And so I hadn't really been in the water for a few years at that point, but I found a pool and I started it and then I never stopped. It was just after a while, you feel you need it. It's my office, it's where I think. I'm swimming, and I'm really, after a couple of minutes, 10 minutes or so, 20 minutes sometimes, I start to imagine what I can shoot. It just happens automatically. And I heard that some people that driving does that for some people. But for me, uh swimming, I guess the tension is released and you go into a kind of really relaxed, creative space.

I feel like driving and being in the pool are the only two places that you can be without a phone these days. I think you're right.

It's the quiet that I love. Like I hear the water, and that is it. And it's really like hypnotic. Even back in the Sundays, I had this idea. I don't have pictures of it, but I wanted to shoot underwater. So I asked Nikon to loan me their underwater film camera called the Nikonos. And I asked a girlfriend's mother if I could borrow her pool and got the basics of how to do it. And it wasn't like a great success, but what I realized was you cannot do this if you don't have your own pool. So I tucked it away. It's very, it's a very messy way of shooting, and most people wouldn't appreciate you going in and soaking their basement, right? So I just put it away in the back of my mind. And about years and years later, we moved to a new house that had a big mud pile in the backyard, and we eventually made a pool in there. And two years later, I realized that I had my whole pool off. So I thought, well, give it a try. Once you get the hang of what you're doing, you don't want to stop because it's so much fun. But you probably have way too many pictures. So I figured this is a good way of me stopping. It's gonna be winter, so I'll have to finish this show within three months. And so that would make it easier. Of course, that never happened because it's been 24 years or so since then. But I did keep the pool open until December, the first year, because I could. And I didn't realize how expensive that was, but I had I did editorial assignments in the pool and shot Underworld at that point. Like I just kept going. And and then after that, I've been better behaved. What have been some career highlights for you? It was very exciting to win fashion, like an international fashion contest in Cannes. And the year before I entered my work, and the person I met there, very talented photographer, he won that year. And he got very drunk, and I had to go up and accept the award. So the next year I entered, but I didn't go. And about two weeks later, somebody emailed me and congratulated me on winning. And I didn't know. So I figured I'd already accepted the award. I don't have to do that again. So that was pretty exciting. And so it's always nice to win things. I showed my work at the Canadian embassies in Canada, in Tokyo, and in Washington. So it was wonderful to get that kind of I don't know the word, confidence that other people had in you. Sure, there's a word for it. That's why I'm a photographer. What else? I just had a book published a couple of years ago from Tenoise in Germany. They called me, they emailed me out of the blue, and I thought it was spam. And the editor, and I read his, he'd love to do a book and talk about this with me. And then I looked at his signature, and it was a publishing house in Germany that does art publishing. And the weird thing was he had been in Canada, in Toronto, maybe 10 years earlier, and found and loved Underworld, the underwater work. And he put a JPEG on his computer and he said, It's been there for years. And he decided this was my time. And so he printed it the JPEG and took it to the art director. And she said, Oh my god, I was just in Toronto a couple of years ago when I saw her work. And I'd love to do it. So it was so weird that happened, but that was very exciting. And they published a book of all my work since 1985, and that was really gratifying. And the editor of that book had an incredible eye, and she put the underwater and the above water work together in themes. It was very important because it helped me understand what I'd been doing, because she saw styles and moments and themes that I'd been doing in two separate places and was able to put them together so I could see the cohesiveness of the whole thing because I felt I was schizophrenic. I was doing things underwater into the studio. And I didn't know that they actually were intertwined.

What have been some harder moments in your career? And how did you overcome them?

They're usually mostly harder moments, to tell you the truth. In between shows, finding out what you want to do next, and you think you'll never have another creative idea again. Very frightening because that is what makes me tick. When I'm shooting, I am happy. And when I'm not shooting, I'm not. So I guess the way I get over it is I just shoot. I don't expect anything. I pick up the camera and I just expect nothing. And I explore a little idea at a time, and eventually it will work out. And sometimes you don't have a very clear idea of what you're doing. It's hard because all my shows come from my heart, they come from my mind and my heart, but I'm not sure exactly what I'm saying. And it's the hardest thing for me to figure out what I'm saying, what I really, what is it at the core? And I often make like I go up the trunk of a tree and go off to a branch and then another branch. And that show is full of branches, but I don't have the trunk at all. So that's a very frustrating time, but I get over it. I've been doing shows since 1984 almost once a year, if not more. It's just not a happy place to be stuck.

Where do you see your work going in the future?

Good question. That's what I'm trying to figure out now. I usually shoot women, and I have never really been successful at shooting men. So the next show I'm trying to do is about the relationship between two figures, a male and a female, and the gesture that will create a little story between them and how I'm gonna shoot it using film or black and white color film, digital backgrounds, no backgrounds, what kind of clothing that's all kind of up in the air, but it's slowly coming together.

What advice would you give to aspiring photographers?

Make sure what you're doing is unique because everybody can do pretty much the generic anything, and you can never make a career on that. But make sure what you're saying is truly unique to yourself. Don't copy. You can get inspired and use that person like I have for many years, Sarah Moon, jump off her shoulders and say, This work still inspires me. What do I have to say? But what I have to say has to be different. And that's what makes you that's what makes people interested in what you're doing, because you're giving them a unique perspective and you're taking a chance and hopefully giving them guspen, allowing them to dive into your narrative and feel it, and then get inspired to do something on their own that they have always wanted to do. That's what I would say. It's not about the camera, never about the camera.

Barbara, thank you so much for your time today. This has been a fantastic conversation. Where can people find your where can people find your work if they're looking for it?

I have five galleries. Toronto at Boshi, and Vancouver at Bochy, in Montreal, Gallery de Belfloy, and in Los Angeles, Art Angels, and in Florida, Golden Lont. L-U-N-T-Z, I always have trouble spelling it. And then just go to my website, barbercole.com, and all the new stuff that's coming up is there. And if you're interested in the books, you can see them there. And there's a lot of mental health resources on my website as well. So I found that when people are in trouble, that that is not the time to look for help because it's very hard to find it when you're in trouble. Just take a look and see if you need help, click on one of the places that I've listed. I think they're about 30 or 40, and check them out. So if you ever are in trouble, you have something in your back pocket that you can't, you know it's there, and you're not going through the system. It's very complicated and slow, and basically you could kill yourself before you get out. I'm trying to avoid that.

Thank you again so much, Barbara.

You're welcome. Take care.