Laura Noel

I am a photographer, book maker, mixed media and installation artist based in Atlanta, Georgia. Though my work has gone through several incarnations - I began as a street photographer - my current work is about finding fresh ways to depict the movement of time. The Marmoreal and Crawling Backwards series examine how memory and experience shape and fictionalize our view of the past. I was profoundly influenced by my Southern Gothic background - my grandparents house in the tiny mill town of Griffin, Georgia, was filled with all sorts of exotic items that they collected around the world including a Polar Bear rug, poison blow darts from the Amazon, a 20 foot long snake skin and even a (allegedly) shrunken head.
Though my work is clean and contemporary, my family history of inventors, sailors, preachers, artists, mill workers and a PE teacher thrown in for good measure, gave me the desire to create as a way of keeping the past alive. The key for me is to look at the past in 21st Century ways - namely digital distortions and layering of photographs and making images in the studio that serve as metaphors.

I have an undergraduate degree in Public Policy Studies from Duke University. I received a Master in Fine Arts in Photography, graduating with distinction, from The University of Georgia Lamar Dodd School of Art in 2009.

My photographs have 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, The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Davis Orton Gallery in upstate New York and Gallery 1401 in Philadelphia.

My photographs have appeared on-line and in print in Photography Now, Hot Shoe (United Kingdom), 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, South X Southeast, La Lettre de la Photographie, Conscientious, aCurator, Fraction Magazine and many others. In 2012, her All’s Fair series inaugurated Fall Line Press’ Free Fall series of quarterly magazines featuring the work of one photographer. Recently, Scotland’s Aglu Books published Withdrawn, a study of discarded library books.

My artist books are in the collections of the International Center of Photography library in New York, the ...