When Cole Sprouse isn't busy solving the murder of Jason Blossom on the CW's new hit show Riverdale, you'll often find him on the other side of the camera, bringing static stories to life.
The actor, who made his return to TV in the form of Jughead Jones at the beginning of the year, took a break from acting when he was in college to pursue other interests, one of which was photography. "Maybe it was escapism, but I had become obsessed with going to remote locations and keeping myself behind the camera," he says, noting that he thinks "that came from a personal place where I was very dissatisfied with the way my society was treating me." What better remedy, then, than to take matters into your own hands and show people not just how you want to be seen but what you're seeing, too?
Since then, Cole's lens has captured everyone from his Riverdale costars to his friends and family, and he often shares his work on Instagram, where more than 3.4 million fans can interact with his work in real time. (That's not counting his other accounts, @sprousemasterworks and @camera_duels, where he posts fan art and photos of people taking photos of him, respectively.) And while there are photos of Cole's own shoots peppered throughout, the colors of his original work are often bright and eye-catching, drawing you to those pictures first.
Teen Vogue caught up with Cole to talk about his photography and how he approaches his craft shortly after he shot actress Hermione Corfield in Los Angeles. He notes that what's more important to him than a commentary on his work is "the image itself. If people want to take to the image and see that and hear that, then that's wonderful. Or just see it, and embrace it, and listen to it, and try to embrace what it's telling the audience, I'd prefer that." But how did he get to that sense of self as an artist? And how is he using his photography to bring a more inclusive worldview to his followers? The answer, it turns out, is on Instagram.
Teen Vogue: What was the process of shooting with Hermione and bringing this particular story to life through photos?
Cole Sprouse: I became obsessed with the storytelling of photography and going on little adventures. The majority of my photography in the past has been trespass photography. I know that sounds a little dubious, but oftentimes the best locations are locations you break into. [Laughs]
When you're working with a company especially that has more legal restriction than you do as an individual agent, you always wonder how shoots are going to go. But we ended up in the L.A. River, so I didn't really sacrifice much. Everyone looked really on point that day. We all knew exactly what we wanted—I had scouted beforehand. Hermione was more than willing to play around near the water or jump in the river, and we had a total blast.
We had worked with the stylist for a more '60s theme, but my personal photography emphasizes an aesthetic contrast between model and interesting landscape. I rely on the stylist quite heavily to pull a narrative through style. Her ability to place that in a time period like the '60s ended up really pushing me in the right direction. We ended up at this wonderful grocery store that was hard, white-and-red paint, and it felt very old school and that was quite nice.
TV: How do you approach your own shoots, when you're not working with a company or a stylist?
CS: It's kind of loosey-goosey. To be honest, the way I think about it is like a serendipity. It's not a luck of the draw, or I don't get too lucky when I shoot and I happen upon the one great photo. I believe that if you mix certain elements that you know are going to possibly lead to a good photo, the lightning will strike in a certain area and you'll end up with a great shot. So I like to location-scout for an interesting place. I like to have a model that's pretty interesting. Oftentimes, the largest gamble I take is in the styles that the model will often bring.
I'm all about the art for art's sake. You always hope the company you're working with is not going to be too restrictive on your own personal influence. But it's not too planned out. The majority of the planning I end up doing is location scouting because that's what I'm most obsessed with—the location of a shoot. I think if you have an interesting story to tell about how the shoot went, you have a good photo, that whatever that story was manages to distill itself into a single frame or into the subject in a way that can be read by the audience.
TV: What inspired you to branch out from acting into photography, rather than directing or some other creative path?
CS: Photography is a pursuit that allows you to be very hands-on with what you show people of either yourself or the art you want to make, and acting is kind of the exact opposite. You do have a modicum of creative freedom as an actor, but you're still very much a cipher for other people's art. If you're a photographer, you end up being the raw creative force that allows other people to see what kind of narrative you want to be giving or what kind of art that you want people to see.
I had become obsessed with the control-freak aspect of photography, and with the rising importance of the image in our social media age it ended up working. I had a palatable, digestible space, like Instagram or social media, to display and curate the collection I wanted to give to people. People ended up liking it.
I was in New York, and I was sort of the center of fashion and fine art photography. I had graduated college and was looking for something to dump myself into a little. I didn't know if I wanted to act again and I ended up getting a lot of jobs with photography. I ended up getting wrapped up in small sub-circles, and from there it was just a ball rolling down a hill.
If I wasn't acting I'd be doing that full-time. I think with the way that we digest information nowadays, photography has become a perfect avenue to give the audience an understanding of yourself that goes a little deeper than a 10-minute interview about a show you're doing or something of the sort. It just made sense to me.
TV: One thing social media and Instagram offer is immediacy. You're right there with your fans and having the conversations about images or through images in real time. How does it feel when you see your fans receive and digest your work?
CS: It's a mixed bag. It depends. A lot of my fan base now is 18 to 23, and the older we get, the wider range of interesting work we come across in our life. It educates us in a way that draws our eye and informs us. The older crowd that follows me really ends up liking it quite a bit.
I heavily moderate my account, and I see opposition from certain audiences when I post a model who's a person of color. Androgyny is unfortunately always something that ends up getting a lot of backlash. I still have a large group of people that follow me that are not used to alternative forms of representation, and their opposition to those forms of representation, to me, displays just how necessary it is. I think as long as I keep getting a kind of backlash on such degree to different kinds of representations, that just displays how much more it needs to happen and how much more I need to place precedence on it.
In that way, I've found my audience is informing very much my own photography over time. I guess that's a strange way to think about it, that the audience informs your art and not the other way around. There is a sense of duty now that needs to be placed upon an artist with a more mainstream background—that you need to show people other ways of life in order to make them more familiar and comfortable with it and less fearful of it. It's been a mixed bag, and generally people take really well to it. I think because honest expression on social media is something that is unfortunately quite rare and because it doesn't seem like advertising when I give it to people, they've taken to it really well. That's made me very happy and, of course, that invests my art with a certain sense of duty.
TV: How do you, both in front of the camera and behind it, navigate the realms of helping make space for and amplify other people's voices or identities, while also using your own voice?
CS: I think the idea that "helping other people is not helping yourself" is the key problem in people not stepping up and doing anything. No man is an island, is the way I think about it. If helping other people or showing other forms of representation is something that helps them, you are inherently in some selfish kind of way helping yourself as well. I think that the selfishness and the selflessness are not two completely different worlds that don't often overlap.
Something that I'm still working on very much is how much of yourself is involved in representing other people. This is a larger argument about altruism, and if it really exists, and if you can just do good for good's sake. I don't know where exactly I fit into that argument, but I know personally it's kind of your job as a mainstream performer to make certain unknown concepts more familiar to people if it reduces fear from both sides. If representation is one of those things that I can make more familiar through an image, that's fantastic.
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