Virtual Gallery - Caleb Cole

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

At the heart of my work is a fascination with ambiguities and inconsistencies, an interest in how I go about negotiating areas of grey and how others manage to do the same.

When I am in public, I watch people going about their daily routines alone; I wonder about the lives they lead, wonder what I can tell about their internal world solely from their clothing and mannerisms.

I spend time inventing stories for them: narratives of isolation, of questioning and searching, of desire, and of confusion. The images in Other People's Clothes are momentary fragments of these stories.

Each photograph in the series is a constructed scene that begins with an outfit or piece of clothing (either bought, found, or borrowed), then a person that I imagine to fill those clothes, and finally a location where that person can play out a silent moment alone.

This moment is the time right before something changes, the holding in of a breath and waiting, the preparing oneself for what is to come.

By inhabiting other people's clothes I can tell their stories, can make portraits of people I have never met but whose strange and contradictory lives feel as familiar as my own.