Life cycles> Orono native Peter Doty creates still-morphed images through rain and snow and wind and hail

Photographers trap time. With a click of the shutter, a single moment is preserved forever. Drops of rain are frozen, blossoms never wilt, snow doesn’t melt. But Peter Doty’s scenic photography teems with motion, summer melting into fall, and dawn into dusk, through a collage technique he calls “still-morphing.” The Maine native’s landscapes show that the only constant in the natural world is change. His works currently are on display in the Thorndike Library at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor.

Growing up in Orono, seasonal changes held little interest for Doty. But when he moved to San Francisco to study in the mid-1980s, the artist found he missed the color and texture of New England’s periodic transformations.

So, for the past decade, Doty has crisscrossed the nation, documenting the ever-changing scenery on both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. He may photograph a single location hundreds of times, over the course of several years before completing the still-morphed collage.

Doty’s most successful collages are his simplest – those that feature a single variable in the ever-changing natural rhythm.

A 1996 piece titled “Seasons of Mount Webster,” shows an endless horizon line painstakingly crafted from slivers of photographs. Striped like an awning, a sky of cobalt and aquamarine tops the gently undulating mountain range. Likewise, a 1996 composition titled “Summer and Snow from Cadillac Mountain” has a soothing continuity as jewel-toned horizontal summer scenes blend into vertical views of winter’s monochromatic palette to make a panorama of Frenchman’s Bay.

More complex pieces, like the 1996 “Bass Harbor Light,” are pieced together from a thousand moments encapsulating all times of the night and day, varying seasons and changing tides. The final result is a dizzying scene composed of more than a dozen bits, with jarring changes at every juncture.Such works overlook Doty’s greatest strength – his precision in slicing and fitting the individual prints to align each tree branch or topographic shift. He works at a table, not a computer, and doesn’t need digital trickery to marry his images.

In a 1998 piece titled “Life Cycles” – one of Doty’s personal favorites – he spirals seasonal views of an apple tree into a continuous pinwheel. A single print represents each stage of growth, meeting in a barely visible cross at the tree’s heart. The shadow from an apple-laden branch at harvest-time reflects onto the snowy scene below, and upon close inspection, a weathered red barn in the background is actually grafted together from three separate photographs.

Occasionally, Doty will take his camera into the field with a composition in mind, but more typically he shoots rolls of film, then fans out dozens of photographs on a table, shifting and rotating the prints until they fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

“Something will click,” Doty said. “It’s like how a painter knows when they’re done with their painting – it’s something indescribable that only they know.”

Peter Doty’s photography will remain on display through the end of November. Through Nov. 17, the Thorndike Library will be open to the public from 8 a.m. to midnight. Saturday, Nov. 18 it will be open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, Nov. 19, from noon to 7 p.m. After the COA fall term ends Nov. 20, library hours will be limited to 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday. The library will be closed Thanksgiving Day and the day after.