#Trump soundboard archive

I was amazed at how much he opened himself up to me in such a short amount of time.” At Caleb’s request, the backstory remains a mystery. “He stood out to me in a crowd, and we had a brief interaction. “I’m hesitant to share because I like the mystery of it,” Caleb says. But as with all the photos in the series, it’s so much more than what it appears. Smartly slicked-back hair, a poorly-tied bow tie and a flower on the lapel are offset against a bandaged nose and a black eye. In his summary of the series Amitava Kumar, a professor at Vassar college, describes it as a “fine, even tender, mix of contradictions,” and this rings true. One photo that stands out in the series is a shot of a teenager on his way to the school prom. “So that might have given me the opportunity to see things slightly afresh.” “I had an outside perspective but I lived there for so long that I grew to love the place,” he says. These interactions bring so much to the series, he isn’t simply an outsider looking in on something he doesn’t understand. “There’s something that I’m drawn to which is a level of emotional intimacy and I think he is also drawn to that so it was good to have those conversations with him,” he says.

Caleb had to work through certain questions about his own photography style and signature, and was lucky enough to be able to use Bruce as a soundboard. He began photographing what he saw around him in Poughkeepsie, from the communal watering hole to the basketball courts to the scrapyard. His time with Bruce afforded him the perfect chance to work on his own photography. I think it slightly demystified things for me as well, because I came to realise that it takes a very long time to make work. “I started to focus on bodies of work more than the power of a single image,” Caleb says.

#Trump soundboard archive

They went through Bruce’s entire archive of images together, and Caleb helped him move through a huge backlog of negatives that had never been looked at before.