Noah Doely

The works in this series are printed as cyanotypes: a photographic process invented in 1842 by the English scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel. I am interested in the ways that different forms of photography from different eras mediate and transform the subject matter they depict. In this case, how the Prussian blue inherent to the cyanotype process subverts, enhances, camouflages, or otherwise alters how the images' content is perceived.

The eye and the camera both developed from simpler, more primitive forms of vision. The pinhole camera and the eye of the chambered nautilus are such antecedent forms. The nautilus' eye, unchanged after 500 million years, is nothing more than a hole in its body. No lens or cornea defines or shapes the images it receives. Similarly, a pinhole camera creates images on a photosensitive interior surface by admitting light through a small hole in the camera body. The photographs in this series are my attempt to create and reveal such ancient visions.

The world this series imagines is of starkly but gently illumined underwater caves: dark, lifeless, rock-formed chambers revealed by single rays or sources of light. These are spaces imagined as existing long before any life forms appeared and as they may well remain long after life has vanished, a primordial landscape for the play of light and darkness.

I produced these images by casting and arranging rocks into cave-like formations, submerging them in a large water-filled glass tank, lighting these aqueous dioramas from a single light-source and then photographing them with exposures ranging from twenty-four hours to several days using a pinhole camera in an otherwise darkened room.

The resulting images are formations much like the nautilus' eye and pinhole camera: light entering through a simple open hole into an otherwise dark space. This series, then, illustrates and explores the reciprocal relationship between a subject and the means of apprehending or recording it, the ancient dialog between what is above and below, between darkness and light.

The photographs in Above & Below were initially inspired by an image of light shining into the "pinhole eye" of a chambered nautilus. To create this sculpture, I made a cast of a chambered nautilus and embedded it in a flat resin surface. Through a tapered opening at the back of the apparatus, a viewer can see a tiny pinhole of light that passes through the center of the nautilus eye.

A flock of birds in decoy form. 

The Passenger Pigeon, once the most abundant bird in North America and possibly the world, was driven into extinction in the early 20th century. The bird can only be experienced through taxidermy, illustrations, photographs and other mediated forms of experience. For this series, I collected photographs of Passenger Pigeon decoys from the late 19th to early 20th century, carved and painted replicas of the decoys depicted, documented them photographically and destroyed the sculptures. I became interested in the decoy as a form of representation that is created for the purpose of deception, but one that often barely resembles the subject it depicts. By attempting to accurately replicate these objects, I wanted to form a complicated relationship between the original, the recreation and the photographic reproduction and through that consider what it means for a decoy to be authentic when the concept of an “original” decoy already seems paradoxical.

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker, one of the largest woodpeckers to ever live, is classified by the American Birding Association as “definitely or probably extinct.” In the early 20th century, the bird’s population was already dwindling and encounters were becoming increasingly rare. It is difficult to say definitively when the last sighting occurred, though Don Eckelberry’s observations from Louisiana in 1944 are generally considered the final account.

In 2004, a man kayaking in the Bayou DeView, part of the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in the Big Woods region of Arkansas, claimed to see an Ivory-bill and his report was quickly investigated by a team led by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The investigators reported approximately 15 additional sightings during their search, seven of which were deemed substantial enough to use as supporting evidence for a paper later published in Science. The only photographic evidence of the sightings came from a video shot from a moving canoe in the Bayou DeView. The bird in the video was distant, blurry, and hard to discern, but it was convincing to many, including trained ornithologists. Other experts disputed the claim, arguing that the video had merely captured the visually-similar pileated woodpecker. Nonetheless, the encounters and subsequent announcement of the Ivory-bill’s rediscovery produced an international media event.

Despite extensive searching, there is still no conclusive evidence – unambiguous photographs, videos, or biological samples – that would confirm the bird’s continued existence. There are believers, skeptics, and a spectrum in between. The Ivory-billed Woodpecker has since become a metaphor for the undiscoverable, and the Big Woods of Arkansas the Area 51 for ornithologists.

I traveled to the Big Woods of Arkansas for the first time in the spring of 2014, 10 years after these events occurred. While there, I rented a boat to explore the depths of the Bayou DeView and recorded video in the same area that the 2004 footage was made. I wanted to experience and document this primordial swamp, a place that has an aura of myth, history, and uncertainty. I had the paradoxical experience of looking for the Ivory-bill despite my disbelief in its existence. I’m interested in the way a visual experience can differ dramatically based on the system of belief that someone brings to it. What constitutes a verifiable eyewitness account? Especially when there are so many trap doors built into the way we gain knowledge through our senses. 

Each image in this series consists of a single photograph of a butterfly wing that I digitally fragmented and rebuilt through a gradual process of pattern formation. This generated new variations of the existing forms, thereby creating a metamorphosis of the image itself. Through magnification, the image and the subject are broken down to their constituent parts (butterfly scales and pixels) each consisting of a single pigment of color. Through this process the original forms and the reconstructed versions of them become interwoven, producing extended patterns that exist in varying degrees of chaos and order.