Artist Statement
Photography is about trying to catch the world with a flimsy net. I don’t know the answers. I venture out with a camera and try to cull meaning – some odd bit of humor or rough beauty or sideways emotion – and print it out on paper. I want to lend some permanence to the ephemera. Time overwhelms me. I take pictures.

 

 

Laura Noel is an Atlanta-based photographer and installation artist. Her work often addresses American cultural issues with an emphasis on how individuals navigate an increasingly homogeneous world. Recent projects include an extended portrait series called Smoke Break, about Americans who continue to smoke in the face of public bans and a shift in public tolerance for the act, and Withdrawn, a study of discarded library books and how technology has altered basic activities such as reading.

Noel received a BA in Public Policy Studies from Duke University in 1988 and a MFA in Photography with Distinction from the University of Georgia in 2009. Her prints been featured in exhibitions at the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China, the Contemporary American Photography exhibition at the Internationale Fototage Festival in Mannheim, Germany, Gallery 24 in Berlin, United Photo Industries in New York City, The Rhode Island School of Design Museum, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, Jackson Fine Art, Lumiere, Davis Orton Gallery in upstate New York, Gallery 1401 in Philadelphia, The Gregg Museum of Art and Design and many others. The George Eastman House, The Ogden Museum, MOCA GA and many other institutions and individuals have collected her photographs.

Her photographs have appeared on-line and in print in Photography Now, Photography Quarterly, PHOTONEWS (Germany), Slate Magazine’s Behold Photo Blog, CNN Photo Blog, Lens Culture, Planet, Art News Daily, The Humble Arts Foundation, F-Stop Magazine, One One Thousand, SouthXSoutheast, La Lettre de la Photographie, Consciencious, aCurator, Fraction Magazine and many others. In 2012, her work inaugurated Fall Line Press’ Free Fall series of quarterly magazines featuring the work of one photographer. Recently, Scotland’s Aglu Books published Withdrawn, her study on discarded library books.

 

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