Barbara Cole       

Title: “Vibrato, from White Noise”
Size: 30” x 40”
Est. Value: $7,000
Medium: Lambda chromogenic print on metallic paper
Date: 2008
Edition Information: 1/8
www.barbaracole.com

Over the past twenty-five years I have been operating as a painter employing standard photographic tools. While I have been creating photographic artwork since 1983, it has only been since 2002 that I have been intrigued by the possibilities of photographing people under water. For me, water becomes a natural lens that refocuses and reinterprets the painterly aesthetic.

Water allows me to move the human figure in unconventional ways. Photography affords me the ability to play with notions of time and place. Seeing through water, rather than through air, makes us re-envision the nature of our relationship to our surroundings.

My training was eclectic and unconventional. I began as a fashion model then worked for ten years as a fashion journalist at a Toronto newspaper. I have worked as commercial photographer in New York as well as a television commercials director before concentrating full-time on my art career.

My work has been exhibited worldwide and is widely collected by both public and private institutions. Underworld, my first underwater exhibition, was shown first at the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo and later at the Embassy in Washington, D.C. The work in “Survivors in Search of a Voice”, opened its tour at the Royal Ontario Museum. I was commissioned to create the artwork for the atrium at the M. Lau Breast Cancer Centre, in Toronto’s Princess Margaret Hospital. I won the Grand Prize at the 6eme Festival International de la Photographie de Mode in Cannes. In New York, I was awarded third prize in the International Photography Awards and the piece was selected to be part of the “Best in Show” at the Lucie Awards in 2009 and was again selected for the Cannes Competition.