Ep 014: Todd Cole
A SHOT: To start, can you describe the photo that we’re going to talk about?
TODD COLE: It’s a photo of a person who began as somebody that I cast through a friend of a friend, but usually with most of the people that I do any kind of extensive series on, they become friends of mine. You make a commitment to each other that they’re gonna go on this journey with you and you also are honest and open and go on a journey with them. So this is my friend Ryan. He’s somebody that is in LA creating his life, I guess for lack of a better word, but he’s someone that I’ve been photographing for about a year or so. This is a photo of him that I did as our little shoots together…. I ended up on a soundstage building out something more specific and intentional. It started out with us going and meeting in Hollywood and hopping on the subway and going wherever we decided to get off the subway, and he would skate, and we would talk, and we would hang out, and I would take pictures. As we continued working together and our relationship grew stronger, and also as I shot out other ideas, I pushed it into this surreal direction. So it’s a photograph of my friend Ryan. That’s a really long way of saying it’s a photograph of my friend Ryan.
It’s interesting that the way that you work is just like maintaining relationships. What about that do you like? Why do you like working that way?
Probably more than anything, the thing that I love about photography, at its core, it is about relationships. It’s about being in a space with someone and experiencing that space together, aware and present to what’s happening in that space. You know, I can talk about lenses, and I can talk about light and all that kind of stuff, but my favorite thing about it is sharing an experience with someone else, and usually in photography it’s someone that you don’t know very well, and in order to get a good picture, we all know there’s an element of trust that has to be built, so it’s that kind of exchange that I think is my favorite thing about it. When I started out, I would go around with a Leica R8 and a 50mm lens and six rolls of film, and I would do photo assignments and take portraits of people and run around all over LA trying to build a career with one camera, one lens. I just met the most amazing people, from TV producers to directors to stylists or whatever, you know, writers, authors, and I just loved that. As my career progressed, I did less and less of that, but now I’ve kind of identified that as the thing that I really… It just really feeds me.
How did this shoot specifically come about? Where does this idea come together?
It came about because I was trying to push myself. As one has a career in photography, you get to a point where you just get bored with it, to be honest. You’ve been in all the scenarios. You’ve been in all the situations, especially if you’re doing commercial or editorial photographs. I was at a place where I was really bored with photography, so I had spent some time trying to figure out what was exciting to me, where I wanted to go, how to do something different and new. I spent a lot of time looking at my old work and digging into it and identifying what I did well and all the things that I really didn’t do well or I didn’t have really anything to offer. Like, I can take a good photograph, but is it any better than anyone else’s? Or does it have my voice? Does it offer anything beyond just a well-executed photograph? I was just in this process of trying to figure that out. I was exploring everything. I was exploring like, “God, do I go back and shoot film again?” because I shot film for a decade or longer, and I’ve been shooting digital. Should I do that or should I stick with digital?
I was just in this period of really trying to re-engage with the joy of taking pictures. I know enough to know that the way you do that is by doing, so I made it easy on myself, and I found Ryan through a friend, and he lives in my neighborhood. As I was going through this process, we would text and I would meet him, like I said, at the subway station. We would go take pictures and while I was getting to know him and enjoying his company, I was also experimenting with different technical things. It was a long process that all culminated with me trying out new technical approaches and renting a space and renting a stage and getting some props. And it’s funny because I had shot some other people at this stage just to maximize my money, but I told Ryan to come down, and he just showed up. We had developed such a trust that he just started doing the things that I knew he would do. Obviously, I had this backdrop, and I had a particular lighting thing that I had kind of dialed in at this point. Ryan just started doing his thing, and I just started taking pictures. It was kind of a culmination of this search just to expand and create a new direction with what I was doing.
What did you like about this?
What I really like about it is it captures a feeling. I’m not interested in the documentary nature of photography. I’m interested in the idea, so I like that I photographed a feeling. I photographed something within me. It’s not a representational portrait of Ryan. It’s more an image of this idea that was circulating as I was spending time with him. It captures a feeling. It’s not a document of a moment because that’s something that I put aside somewhere along the way. I’m more chasing feelings and capturing feelings.
I got really obsessed with this idea of the sublime, which is an aesthetic in art from the 18th century, the idea of being in awe of something. It started off being you’re in awe of a landscape — Caspar David Friedrich or J. M. W. Turner or that type of pushing the colors to a place that captured the awe of nature. It’s evolved into this idea of, like, how do we paint a picture of a sensation or a feeling? I just got really into that idea, so this photo of Ryan was kind of in that realm of ideas that I was playing with. It seemed like a sublime representation of who I thought this kid is.
That’s interesting that you say “who this kid is” because, in a sense, you’re still documenting him. It is an image of him. It’s capturing part of him, but it’s expressing the thing that you want to express.
What’s interesting to me is I’m dealing with a real person. I’m putting him in whatever situation it is. It could be on the streets. It could be on a stage. It could be something really constructed. I’m taking what I know of who they are, but I’m also trying to create an image of the feeling inside me of how I see the world or what I think is interesting about the world, and yeah, it’s a combination of both for me.
In that sense, how important is it that it’s him?
He can’t be separated from it. It’s a weird kind of magic that happens. Like, I’m not into fashion, but I’m really into style. Style to me is how people present themselves and how they choose to dress. That’s always something that’s really interested me. Ryan showed up on the day, and he took his jacket off. He actually brought two outfit changes. There’s another one where he’s dressed in a different look, but then he put on this white, you know, what he’s wearing. So he brought that to the picture. That’s him but then all of the sudden juxtaposed against this space backdrop. It’s corny, but he feels like an astronaut to me. I grew up in Houston, NASA and all that shit. That’s also part of me. My love of space.
Can you describe your presence behind the camera here when you’re taking this? What are you saying? What is your direction? How actively are you controlling the situation?
I try to let the situation completely unfold. For most people, unless they’re a real pro — you know, you shoot certain models or certain celebrities that are incredibly comfortable in front of the camera — but I feel like most people, the more direction you give them, the more they go within. It can really make people self-conscious unless they are a professional. I didn’t really tell him anything. I knew he’s a skater, so I knew he was gonna skate, so I probably said like, “Whatever you’re doing, do it right there,” because I had a lot of mixed sources of lighting, and that was the spot to do it. But beyond that, I just kind of let him do it.
So what’s your setup for when you’re taking a photo like this?
I would say I try to be as simple as possible. I don’t like a lot of stuff. What I was doing technically, I was experimenting with with mixed sources, so I had a strobe. I had a constant light, and then I had a certain small flash on my camera. So I’m gelling certain strobes, and then I have another color on a continuous light on the side, and then I’m also strobing it. But it’s all in the purpose of getting this sublime-ish image.
Did anything surprise you about this photo specifically?
Yeah, you know, I was fully embracing digital, and this was shot on digital. I’m at a place now where I think digital is really interesting because there’s something really fascinating about the elasticity of a digital image. Film is beautiful, and you shoot it on a Pentax 6x7, and it comes out, and it’s fully baked, and you don’t have to do anything, but what I’m interested in is finding a space and a color through manipulating the digital image. I used a bunch of different things to do that, and I was surprised at how well it worked. I was very happy with the hues and the skin tones and this color space that it lives in that I’d like to think is neither film nor what we think is normal digital. It’s just somewhere in between, and it’s an area that I think is really interesting that I’m trying to push into even more and more.
With that in mind, do you try to shoot it in a way that it exists like that in camera, or do you shoot it with the plan to then push and pull and manipulate it how you want?
It’s pretty much in camera. But having said that, that’s basically what I captured in camera. There’s a lot of different filters on my camera and, like I said, mixed lighting sources. I try to capture as much as I can in camera. I didn’t do a lot of post work on that at all. Having said that, I’m doing so much stuff in front of the lens that it just shifts the pixels that are captured by the camera. I’m putting so much stuff in front of the lens, it’s deconstructing the digital image.
I like that you said “deconstructed.” Looking at some of the images that you sent, I was thinking that there was like a damaged quality to them. You’re not really chasing these pristine moments with those images and oftentimes the photos seem like they’re in celebration of what someone might consider the faults of an image. Understanding it as deconstructed makes sense, in that way. What do you like about that specifically? It’s almost like when you used to make zines back in the day and the joy that you would get of doing it on a Xerox machine and seeing how the image kind of breaks down.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, shooting in magazines for years, I would take my pictures, and I would print it in a darkroom early on and send them off to a magazine, and then they would scan them and, you know, i-D would print in some kind of four-color process I didn’t understand, and it would just become something else than what it was when it left my hands. I think as a young photographer there was a lot of stress. You know, I’m sure so many photographers have been there, like, “Oh, my god, that doesn’t look like what I printed or my print or my file or what I retouched.” All those things kind of make you crazy as a photographer. That was one of my biggest lessons. I mean, it sounds so obvious now but the idea that perfection is just an illusion. I would shoot my film. I would go to the lab, and I’d get it back, and I’d be disappointed, and I think every photographer’s like that, and if they say they’re not, they’re lying. But that’s the process of being a photographer. I don’t know if my pictures got any better, but my life got better when I just stopped worrying about things being perfect, and then, if that’s the case, as I continued on, it becomes kind of fun to fuck it up, you know what I mean? Really clean photographs are not exciting to me, so I think it’s kind of just the fun of deconstructing an image. And then in that process, I discovered hues and colors and tones that are exciting to me.
I had this really critical moment in my development as a photographer. When I was starting out, I was shooting 4x5, and I was shooting 35mm. And I couldn’t decide between the two. They both had their qualities, and obviously, 4x5 is all about getting your angles right, your lines right. There’s no spontaneity in 4x5. Once you got the camera up, you’re kind of dialing shit in, and it kills the spontaneity. And on the other side, I was shooting 35mm, and I was in love with that, too. And I couldn’t decide between the two.
Simultaneously, I was in love with Stephen Shore’s photographs, and I was in love with William Eggleston’s photographs, equally. I guess I made a choice. I was like, “4x5 has no spontaneity,” and it’s back to what I was saying earlier: That’s embracing the pure documentarian quality of photography. Stephen Shore was, like, the first time anyone had taken an 8x10 camera and turned his camera on his breakfast. And at that moment in 1973 or whenever it was, it was a revelation because no one had ever done that and color was really just becoming a respected art form in photography. It changed photography, and it was incredible. But it was a document. And if you look at William Eggleston’s photographs, it’s all an emotion. It’s all poetry. He’s walking around responding to things emotionally, and they’re not perfect, and they’re not completely composed. I just kind of had this moment where I was like, “Oh, that’s way more interesting to me than this pure documentary aspect.” And I’m over-simplifying it, and it was a subjective moment for me, so I’m not saying this is true throughout the history of photography. But that was my experience of looking at those two artists side by side, and I made a decision to chase a feeling as opposed to document a moment.
An obvious element of this image is that it’s flipped. It’s upside down. Is that something that you knew you wanted to play with?
I’m pretty adamant now that nothing’s precious. It’s all open for manipulation. Like, it’s so easy, but I flipped it because it makes a better picture, and whatever, he’s doing a kick-flip, but you turn it upside down — not to destroy the magic of the photo — but you turn it upside down, and all of the sudden, he’s floating through outer space. It’s an easy gag, but it’s not incongruent with what I was going for in the first place.
So one thing that I really love about this image is how much you’re playing in the artificial here. You’ve taken clearly a fake setting, staged an action in front of it and then altered the action so that not even that is what’s really going on. Even the lighting is this bright hot artificial flash. How often do you find yourself playing in something artificial? And is that something that you were looking for?
You know, it’s interesting. More and more. Artificial wasn’t really what I was all about early on in my career, but in this process of opening it all up, everything becomes fair game, and I think that it adds to the story, and the next thought in my head was it’s all artificial to me. Everything is artificial to me. Back to my idea about the documentarian quality of photography, I don’t know if we can take a picture that’s not with some artifice at this point. I think it’s enough to say that I’m embracing the artificial. I had spent some time photographing Ryan, and then I was always pressing him to do something artificial because this is part of the thing. He had his image of himself that he wanted to present to the camera, so I engaged with that and did a lot of that with him, but I was always thinking, “No, I want to create kind of an artificial world that represents this idea that I have about you and your place in LA.” Part of the idea was like, I love LA, and I love LA because I came out here to reinvent myself, and then you realize once you’re out here pretty quickly that most everybody out here has come out here to reinvent themselves. And then I realized, like, in the history of America, people traveled West to reinvent themselves, for a better life. The whole mythology of the American West. From the beginning I saw Ryan as a kid who was reinventing himself in LA in part of a long lineage of people who’ve come out here to chase their dreams or reinvent themselves, and from the very beginning, I had this feeling that I wanted to capture that, and I wanted to do this in this sublime way. And I wanted to create kind of an artificial image of that experience. I had suggested a lot of things to him, but this was the one time where it all came together.
I think there’s an element to it where the actual practice of photography, the process of using your camera, the evidence that decisions have been made are as much a part of the image as the image itself. I kind of think about how when you watch a Kubrick movie, he would always want to remind you that you’re watching a movie, something that’s created. How much do you think about that, the idea that the image you’re making is itself conveying the idea that something has been created?
That’s always been really interesting to me. It’s always been about the idea, and generally those ideas are explorations into my psychology or my childhood or my unconscious, things that are always in my mind that have been a part of me from the past. So photography has always been a way to explore my subconscious, but it’s through ideas and not through just photographing my day to day. You know, also there’s this thing about movies and cinema and the artifice of photography. I think it goes back to this idea that photography to me is a tool to create characters and to create narratives and in doing that, it’s kind of hard not to embrace the artifice of it all. If it’s me using the language of cinema, or constructing shots that feel like a film still, I’m kind of accepting the idea that there’s some artifice in this.
What about this photo is cinematic?
It’s kind of a heroic picture. He’s a character in costume heroic against an expansive background. I think we feel the presence of the light. Classic cinema, you always feel the presence of the light.
Can you talk a little bit more about the presence of light? I think it’s interesting, and that’s a nice turn of phrase of the way to describe it. A lot of people would look at the presence of light in this image and just be like, “Oh, overexposed,” but when you call it that, I see what your intention is.
Yeah, in photography, you don’t have any feeling if you don’t have any light. And light is what gives the subject its shape and, as a consequence, gives the photograph its feeling. We all play with that in any way that we want to, and anyway, it’s all fair game. We can do whatever we want with it. It’s just knowing that those are the tools to generate feeling in a photograph. I love the shadow. The shadow is about the artifice of the situation. To me subjectively, what’s the point of making this feel like he’s truly floating in outer space. It would be exhausting to me, like making the film Gravity or whatever, and at the end of the day, all you really have is a kid in a white outfit floating in outer space. Well, we’ve all seen that before, but have we seen a photograph that embraces the artifice that you know doesn’t exist in outer space but yet he’s still falling and he’s got some attitude and he’s got some style? It’s all about the presence of light.
What did you like about the brightness?
If you zoom in, I love the blur on the images. There’s a series of these photographs, and they all have different degrees of motion blur and just the shades that race down the arm of the kid and the glow, and it just has this kind of hazy, ethereal quality that resonates within me. You know, maybe it’s about a memory or something. We think back to like… I remember seeing Star Wars as a kid, and like, it’s all hazy to me. Maybe that’s something that is in me that I can’t even really… It’s ineffable, like Star Wars and Stormtroopers.
I also think of, like, images of the moon landing and that kind of video and the quality of that.
That’s the pinnacle to me as a photographer. We all shoot on Earth, but if we could shoot on the fucking moon, that’s all I wanna do. Michael Light has this book of photographs that the Apollo astronauts took, and they all had Hasselblads. They’re on their space suits. And they land on the moon, and they just started taking pictures, and to me, to this day, they’re the most beautiful photographs I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve been talking about a lot of theoretical shit, but at the end of the day, that’s within me. It’s me juxtaposing my subconscious onto this character that I’m creating, but the character is still anchored in who this kid is that I’ve been hanging out with.
What are you giving to it? What are you pulling from your subconscious that you’re giving to this image?
We have to trust our subconscious. We have to trust and know that all those things that are within us from our experiences and our childhood, those are the most precious things. I realized this at some point early on in my career, and I’ve said this to young photographers: Anyone can take a good picture, but the only thing we have to offer the world as a photographer is who we are because we’re all unique. So if we, in whatever way, articulate who we are as honestly as possible, then we’re creating things that are unique. That alleviates a pressure that we feel in our day-to-day of “Oh, I’ve gotta make something really cool. I gotta…” whatever it is. But the path is to articulate ourselves as honestly as possible, and I think the only way to do that is to listen to our subconscious. So my subconscious is full of Star Wars and outer space and moon landings, and like I said, I’m from Houston, so I remember as a child going to NASA and touring NASA and seeing the space capsules and climbing in the space capsules. It’s my childhood, you know? So I purposely chose that backdrop. I chose what lights I wanted to light it with, and then I had my friend who I had a relationship with that I was exploring another idea about the history of LA, and it’s all funneling into my own unique expression of what I think it is to be alive.
Very rarely is there the feeling that someone’s standing still in your work. Where do you think that comes from?
It’s innate. I prefer images where there’s movement because when you have movement, something’s happening. There’s spontaneity. There’s something that I can’t predict. So much of my photographs are trying to, especially when I’m on set whether it’s personal or commercial, I’m trying to generate a moment where something’s gonna happen that is surprising to me. I learned early on, I could plan a picture, a portrait or whatever it was, and go into a shoot and completely execute that picture, but it was never as exciting as what could happen if I cultivated something spontaneous. I’m sure you’ve had it where subjects come in and they sit a certain way or they stand a certain way, and you can light the shit out of it. You get that picture, but I’ve learned early on, if there’s a little bit of manipulation, and especially movement, something happens that is spontaneous and has an energy that I couldn’t orchestrate without it. My favorite things to do is to shoot dancers or anyone who’s really in control of their body. And you give them the smallest direction, and they have this ability to create shapes and forms with their bodies that I couldn’t even begin to imagine. And even skateboarders are like that.
Was skateboarding a part of your life?
It wasn’t at all, which is what’s so crazy about this. Part of my late appreciation and massive respect for skateboarding was from being with Ryan. I grew up in Texas, and I played football, the whole thing. But I never skateboarded, or I did a few times, and I racked terribly, and that was kind of enough for me. There’s an amazing thing about skateboarding that I’ve only really recently learned, and Ryan explained it to me. The reason so many skaters go on to be successful businesspeople is because in order to skate, you have to try something and fail, and fail and fail and fail and fail again until you finally land the trick. I just think that’s the most amazing, truest thing. We have to try and fail, and skateboarders do it every day, and then they finally… They develop a confidence, and they eventually land the trick, so a lot of them usually go on and are entrepreneurs and do things because they have the courage to try and fail, which I think is huge.
What does the color in this photo convey?
Hope. That’s what comes to my mind is hope. Knowing Ryan and who he is and just where he is in his life and what he’s trying to accomplish, I feel like he’s at a pivotal point in his life, like I think a lot of people are in their early 20s. And I know he is, in his own way, like we all were. But there’s a quality in blues. It’s an interior color to me. It’s like a calming or slightly sad color, but I feel like that color juxtaposed by the energy and him doing what he loves is maybe what makes the picture emotional. Because color is everything. Every color conveys an emotion. And I think that it’s kind of hard to pre-plan that. I’m sure it’s like how you are on set. “Do you want the red one or the yellow one?” You’re like, “Yellow feels better. Let’s do yellow.” It’s kind of an unconscious thing. And then you shoot it, and then you get the film, and then you respond to the color that works for the image. Then it becomes a thing that says something about who we are.
What have you learned that has given you the instinct to take this photo specifically?
Just trusting myself. I was exploring, and I was looking for a new way to light things, to photograph things. When I shot this, it was just me, and I guess I had two assistants and this backdrop and this burned out kind of soundstage in south LA. I was mixing up a lot of different light sources. I didn’t really know how it was gonna look or turn out, but I knew it would be something interesting. I trusted myself and let go to the moment at hand and let Ryan skate and shot with my shitty flash on my camera and my other strobe to the side and my other light panel and just trusted that it was going to be good and had fun and didn’t add any pressure.
In the early days that was never the case. This idea of controlling everything is such an illusion. You can’t control anything, and I think when taking pictures, I try to put strong elements in place and then show up and just let go and trust whatever’s happening is gonna work. And I go back to this idea that I’ve always held up front in anything I do: The only thing that we can offer as a photographer is ourselves, and in order to offer an honest and unique version of ourselves, we just need to trust ourselves. It’s fuckin’ scary, when you’ve got money on the line or a client or whatever, but it’s the best way to be.
Like, I go back and look at pictures when I was first starting out. I did this recently. And I remember when I shot my first editorial fashion story. It was me with a Leica R8 and a 50mm lens and 35mm film and maybe a Contax G2, and I shot this story, and I went back and looked, and I’m like, “Shit, man, I just wanna take pictures like that again. Those were good pictures.” But I remember at the time I was like, “I suck. These are terrible.” So my point is, it’s there from the beginning for all of us, like it’s not just me or you. It’s for all of us. We just have to trust ourselves and try to open up and operate from a little bit of our unconscious.
So to close the conversation, what’s something unrelated to photography that’s been feeding you creatively lately?
I’ve always had one foot in photography and one foot in filmmaking. Like, I moved to LA to be a director. I’ve written two movies — and so just, plays. Like, I’m really, really into plays. I’m into building characters, and I’m into writers that build a world and suck you into a world. I’m really into the Greek plays, like Oedipus. I’m really into the idea that I’ve seen in screenplays, plays and actually ancient Greek plays that makes me realize that the human condition, the dramas that we all are experiencing now, our relationships with our parents, with our authority figures, people have been writing about this shit for thousands and thousands of years. So reading a play like Oedipus makes me realize the condition of being a human being has remained relatively unchanged for thousands of years. And I just think that’s fascinating.
Interviewed on February 18, 2021.
(This transcript has been edited for brevity.)