| A friend of mine once remarked that, “honesty lives in the water.” I expect that what he meant by this was that when we are immersed in water we are more concerned with the preservation of the self than with the presentation of the self; water is not home to the ego. My “Underworld” works, my “Immersion Portraits” and my current “White Noise” project all involve the total immersion of my subjects—and my parallel immersion alongside them with the camera. For almost a decade now, I have been working in pools and tanks of water, utterly absorbed by the way in which water heightens and mythologizes human action and experience. |  |
Musing Aloud – Barbara Cole
A friend of mine once remarked that, “honesty lives in the water.” I expect that what he meant by this was that when we are immersed in water we are more concerned with the preservation of the self than with the presentation of the self; water is not home to the ego. My “Underworld” works, my “Immersion Portraits” and my current “White Noise” project all involve the total immersion of my subjects—and my parallel immersion alongside them with the camera. For almost a decade now, I have been working in pools and tanks of water, utterly absorbed by the way in which water heightens and mythologizes human action and experience.
In the years before I consigned myself and my photographic production to water, however, I made photographs that were about women—women in “situations.” From 1993 through 1994, this series of photographs, entitled “Painted Ladies,” consisted, I suppose, largely of autobiographical material: various versions of myself, first in black and white and then in colour. Adapted for use in the controlled lighting of the studio and considerably manipulated and mediated, Polaroid film allowed me to generate images that were as soft and as painterly as possible. In addition, it allowed me to capture richer colours, of which I am very fond—colours chosen from a fluid and rather milky palette.
I think this photographic lushness has always been important to me, from my early fashion work onwards. Indeed, the idea of pictorial flow—of the gentle fluidity of the image—has continued from my artistic past and now informs the “Underworld” works and the works making up the “White Noise” series.
After the period of the “Painted Ladies” photographs, I began to travel a good deal—to England, Germany, France and to India, Bali and Taiwan, among other places. These wanderings resulted in a lengthy series of works that I loosely, and more simply, referred to as my “Places” photographs—images that were part travelogue fact and part subjective fancy. I also made them as luscious and as unabashedly romantic as I possibly could. I treated the fruits of a trip to Israel in 1996 the same way, using the glowing, golden photographs that I took in Jerusalem as a way of bridging the gap between the reality of that venerable city and the poetic imaginings I clearly brought to it.
After that, I photographed closer to home in Toronto. In June of 1995, I photographed my 96-year-old grandmother. In the course of reminiscing with her about her own upbringing in Toronto, I decided to retrace my life here as well, meandering through the streets—a female flaneur if you will—and generally getting lost in my own city for almost a year. The photographs I took on these goal-less excursions became my “Toronto” series—images of the city I knew well, but made in a way that repainted it with as much wonder as I could muster.
Such was the case, too, with my “Human/Nature” series that followed: here, I married the landscapes I photographed while I was abroad to other images constructed in my Toronto studio. The resulting photographs, both hand-manipulated and computer-assisted, offered flowing, mercurial effects that I believe led directly to my type of “immersive” photography.
My “Underworld” works began beside my swimming pool. I have always been a strong swimmer, and I was suddenly seized by the idea of plunging my models into the water and photographing them while swimming along beside them. I remember how, at one point after the project began, I even strapped a ten-pound weight to my stomach so that I’d sink to the bottom of the pool and could lie there photographing the models from below as they hung suspended above me. It quickly became clear to me that the photographing of models, dressed but totally immersed in water, was a remarkably powerful idea.
Water, after all, is both beautiful and dangerous, and therefore richly symbolic. Archetypal even. We are born from water and we can drown in it; it gives life and takes it away. Water appears to create forms that, to our above-water eyes, seem formless, continuous, metamorphic and perhaps even transformative. Water mythologizes; my models, as filmy and ethereal in the water as nymphs and goddesses, at once became universalized figures living in light.
At present, I am busy with an immense project that I call “White Noise,” as well as the lenticular photographs that are a byproduct of this project. Here, the immersion experiences required in my earlier works are now combined with an attempt to extrapolate from the watery matrix in which they begin, a physical expression of the experience of selfhood. The “White Noise” works thus attempt to show us, simultaneously, the inside and the outside of the human act—and its possible meanings.
