The photographs in Caleb Cole’s series Traces began as images in gay men’s magazines of the 1980s and 1990s—the height of the AIDS epidemic. In an act oscillating between tenderness and violence, Cole excised the male figures from their respective scenes, filling in the void with collaged elements that reproduce parts of the existing photograph. The resulting pictures poetically allude to the shadows of a generation lost to the AIDS crisis and address issues of anonymity, vulnerability, and visibility as Cole considers the visual lineage of queer bodies in the present.