Barbara Cole｜Between Worlds
Ink Drop 32, Watermarks, 2005, Barbara Cole
Written by Luxi He
What is water to a photographer? The question wanders between the worlds. Water, the liquid that’s in our body, the liquid out of which our body emerged in the most ancient biological memory, the blue, clear or turquois fluidity that we will at the end dissolve into. And the photographer, whose camera at hand speaks of a grainy history of the silver salt, whose shutter knows not the time river but the clear cut of a quarter of a second. To answer this question is to be in between worlds, is to bend photography across its physical nature and beyond, and it is in Between Worlds, a new monograph by the Canadian photographer Barbara Cole, that we see an imagery record of her three-decade-long exploration into the fluid aesthetics with polaroid, film, and waterproof camera gear.
Blue Water, High Rise Magazine, 2004, Barbara Cole
Men’s gaze at the water has been as archaic as the activity of gaze. From the primordial seafaring log that noted the ups and downs of tides, to the quiet contemplation on ocean, as manifest in Gaston Bachelard’s Water and Dreams the gaze upon and interaction with water has marked one of the most profound poetics and the bravest voyage-out of our race. As the generations before her, Barbara Cole is intrigued by the curves and shapes in the watery imagery, and to combine it with the observation of a photographer, she creates the series that blurs the boundary between portrait and underwater photography.
Ink Drop 003, Watermarks 2005, Barbara Cole
In her most signature series, Cole’s lens follows tenderly the swimming body of her subjects, and with tacit sophistication, she translates the watery motifs into the poetic bodily symbols that also celebrate femininity. Also working on quiet suggestiveness, the white silk dress floating in the cyan water indicates an equally fluid body; and the hair, each lock seems to follow one of the million possibilities in water, evokes the old similarity between kelp and siren’s hair. Behind Cole’s watery portrait is a powerful line of alternative mythology and cosmology that follows the gesture of female gods, whose life, as Cole’s photographs point out, is either born in the water or has been weaved together with the genealogy of water: the sea girls, the mermaids, Siren, Medusa, and Mazu.
Girl Interrupted Diptyque, Underworld, 2002, Barbara Cole
“Watery eyes” – the apt metaphor long lives in our language speaks of the connection between water as a medium and vision. Following the tradition of employing the liquid surface as a filter, Cole goes a step forward to invite the full, uncertain creativity of water into photography as a subject matter, and as an expression of space. To photograph underwater means a more complex light condition that cannot be predicted or calculated as in anywhere else. It means, for a photographer, to renounce a crucial part of the creative sovereignty and to give it back to water. A certain amount of passivity lies at the core of underwater photography as water’s forms are to be followed, to be observed, but not to be grasped, to be chased. The blue water seems to allure the camera’s reverie, and the latter, through capturing the forms and light reimagined in this medium, has enlightened what Josephine Raab calls “the repertoire of shapes and visual strategies – waves and curves”.
Ink Drop 006, Watermarks, 2005, Barbara Cole
