Images copyright Laura Noel. Via 1000 words Photography Magazine.Laura Noel is one smart cookie. Try reading her artist statements on each of her collections on http://www.lauranoel.com . They're full of lines like "The urge to love and the urge to either avoid or commit violence are two of the most powerful pulls in the human psyche" and "I fracture the story into diptychs so the line where the two images meet becomes the seam between fact and fiction, reality and longing, the universal and the personal." My goodness. So, not to be facetious, but, she's very post-mod.
Check out Fiction. In this collection she pairs two images together that don't seem to have any connection...or do they? Hmmh...So, in one shot, you've got a woman in a salmon pink skirt crossing a road, paired with a flowered mattress abandoned in the countryside. She compares this to a short story - 'only the endings can never be certain'. But for me, this is pure cinema. The two images remind you of the way a camera cuts from one scene to the next and back again. This cinematic feel doesn't seem new to Noel's work. She's done a lot of landscapes, all with that Edward Hopper feel (you know, the painter who did 'Nighthawks'); a setting pregnant with anticipation, the half-second before the star actor sweeps before the camera.
I particularly like her photos of Cuban playgrounds. I did a mad two week trip round Cuba a few years back, where the plan was to see absolutely everything in a fortnight. Cuba's not really small enough for this to be a good plan - we spent around four to five hours a day driving, which would have been tedious as anything, aside from the colours. Cuba was made for photography. It's cupcake coloured, daubed in vibrant, sickly pastels. If you painted it, maybe it would just come across that you were painting in technicolor. But photography gets it spot on, especially in Noel's case, where she resists the temptation to photograph gaggles of adorable Cuban children leapfrogging and getting up to japes, and instead lets the settings speak for themselves. There's something eerie, in a shivery enjoyable Halloween way, about the clash between the sheer prettiness of the colours of these photos and the emptiness - the lack of people, the ghost town quality. And that, too, is exactly right. The thing about Cuba that nobody could get their heads round were people's daily routines. Sometimes you'd arrive in a place that was supposed to be a bustling metropolis, and the streets would be deserted, other times it'd be a dreary, grey afternoon in some backwater town and you'd find the entire populus crammed into a small, nondescript cafe drinking heavily and dancing, really dacing, sweaty dancehall shoving up agaist each other. The fluctuations between the streets being empty and being swarmed with people were sudden and seemingly without reason. So there's that, too.
Go check her out and see for yourself.
