Education and career
Carole Harmel was born in Washington, DC. She began college as an English literature major at Smith College, but gravitated to art and transferred to Antioch College in Ohio, for its freer atmosphere. After earning a BA in Art (1969), she continued on to graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she studied under renowned photographers Barbara Crane, Kenneth Josephson, Ken Josephson, Frank Barsotti, and Harold Allen.Carole Harmel official websiteWork
Three things underlie much of Harmel's work: a desire to challenge photographic "reality" and logic, her interest in surrealism, and humor that varies from playful to disquieting. Her work divides into three major bodies: nudes (1972—1984); still lifes often involving narrative (1984—1998); and collaborative works (2009—).Nudes
Harmel quickly gained recognition for her nudes, which were described as provocative, compelling and disturbing in their suggestion and psychological acuity, and deft in the use of color, texture and composition.Frueh, Joanna. "Harmel's photographs," ''Midwest Art'', April 1976, p. 2.Finkel, Candida. "Carole Harmel", ''New Art Examiner'', May 1980. In them, she sought to disrupt photography's status as a record of reality, in order to access "expression of an inner, more surreal existence."Harmel, Carole. Artist statement, Chicago: Artemisia Gallery, 1973. She incorporated masks, makeup, costumes and other props that confuse, contradict or obscure the human and sexual reality of her figures, as well as techniques like Solarisation, solarization and toning to further remove the images from objective reality.Haydon, Harold. Exhibition review, ''Chicago Sun-Times'', March 16, 1975, Sect. 1B, p. 9. Writer Joanna Frueh described the work as both aggressively sexual and absurd, and observed that Harmel's compositions and eerie coloring seemed to trap subjects "in a twilight zone somewhere between everyday life and dreams—or nightmares—come true." Critics such as Frueh and Dick Jeske found that Harmel's unexpected juxtapositions—of bodies, props, theatrical settings, and spatial or conceptual references (front/back, female/male)—multiplied the uncanny expressive possibilities in her images. Jeske suggested that her work revealed submerged psychological aspects in everyday subjects, evoking a "mythological but simultaneously contemporary world" or emergent "gods and goddesses" he found haunting or menacing. In her pastel-toned ''Old Dresses'' series (1980), objects came to the fore. Placing antique garments in ambiguous relationships to nude figures, she created antitheses—fabric/skin, fronts/backs, female garments/male nudes, sight/touch—that writer Candida Finkel said carried a surreal, erotic charge as the dresses, though disembodied, continued to conjure humanness.Harmel, Carole. Artist statement, "Old Dresses" exhibition, Chicago: Galerija, 1981. In the Jean Cocteau, Cocteau-influenced ''Bird'' series (1983), Harmel used framing to fragment and abstract her explorations of the "Leda and the Swan" myth in tightly cropped, voyeuristic imagesBone, James. "Art Facts: a mix of media on Wells Street," ''Chicago Reader'', March 11, 1983. of a nude female and an undefinable birdlike creature hinting at intimacy.Lauerman, Connie. "Photos show and tell all about erotica, 80s-style," ''Chicago Tribune'', August 11, 1982, Sect. 4, p. 1-2.Pieszak, Devonna. "Carole Harmel," Catalogue essay, Chicago: Galerija, 1983. Critic Devonna Pieszak wrote that the images' simultaneous evocation of bestial/tender and fascinating/repulsive "reclaim for sexuality the mysterious anxieties and anticipations contemporary explicitness eliminates." Reception of the work was not without controversy. Joanna Frueh wrote, "You can't view Carole Harmel's photographs with indifference. When gallery-goers walked into Artemisia for her 1974 show, they left immediately or lingered to let seep in what rattled the less voyeuristic." In 1978, Harmel and Liz Fruzyna presented their collaborative nude, frontal ''Portraits of Men''. Finkel called them "the feminist answer to the male power trip which the female-nude-as-art-form has been," noting their classic form, composition and elegant tonality referenced historical nudes including Edward Weston, Weston's and Wynn Bullock, Bullock's photographs of women.Finkel, Candida. "Liz Fruzyna and Carole Harmel", ''New Art Examiner'', October 1978.Still lifes and narrative works
In 1984, Harmel began creating still life series that retained a surrealist edge recalling René Magritte, Magritte and Duane Michals, but employed word and visual play, color (post—1986), and narrative, reflecting her film studies experience. She continued to question photographic reality through disassociations, unusual juxtapositions—and now puns—in works she called more "poetry than prose."Harmel, Carole. Artist statement, "Light Writings" exhibition, Chicago, 1995. In her ''Natural Disasters'' series (1984—1993), Harmel created small stage sets where the relationship between the internal space of a photograph and the external world of its setting were fluid; in sequential images, the sets are invaded by elements such as flowers, fruit or stripes that escape a painting, photograph or still life in the set. These elements often allude to the relationship between art and reality, with nature no longer a passive subject, but an active agent. ''Train of Thought'' (1993), created for the Illinois State Museum, features a sequence that references Magritte's ''Time Transfixed'', in which a photographed playground train leaves its picture on the wall, becomes three-dimensional, and enters the space of the room.Illinois State Museum. "Place," Catalogue essay, Springfield, IL/Chicago, 1994. The ''Light Writings'' series (1991—1996) was Inspired by Harmel's PhD research. Here she juxtaposed the idea of photography as "writing" on film with light, actual writing on photographs, and wordplay such as homonyms, in sequences like ''Berried'', in which a chair is gradually buried in strawberries. In this series, Michael Weinstein observed "Harmel is at her best when she is a not-so-merry prankster … acknowledging the slings and arrows of fate and redeeming them with wit," and cited the sequence, ''Not a bed of roses'' (1994) as a model.Collaborative work
In the 2000s, Harmel's work took an increasingly collaborative turn. She worked with her husband, painter Arthur Lerner, on her "Facing Amedeo Modigliani, Modigliani" series (2009), to create portraits of Chicago artists which Lerner painted in the style of Modigliani over images that Harmel shot of each person. In "Chicago Odyssey" (2011), she reached back to her beginnings as an undergrad lit major to co-create What Weinstein called "boldly rollicking" works replete with pathos and wit, in which artists cast themselves as characters in Homer's classic and then worked into portraits Harmel took of them.Weinstein, MichaelWriting and teaching
From 1979—1982, Harmel wrote about photography and film as a contributing editor for the ''New Art Examiner'' and ''Exposure'', and as Chicago correspondent for ''Afterimage''. Her contributions included reviews on André Kertész, Wynn Bullock,Harmel, Carole. "Wynn Bullock," ''New Art Examiner'', June 1978, p. 17. contemporaries Keith Smith,Harmel, Carole. "Adam and Adam," ''Afterimage'', October 1980, p. 14. Jane Wenger,Harmel, Carole. "Jane Wenger: The dialectics of sexuality," ''Afterimage'', December 1979, p. 12. Joseph Jachna and Harold Allen, and major exhibits.Harmel, Carole. "Faceful Renditions," ''Afterimage'', December 1980, p. 16-7.Harmel, Carole. "Chicago Color: 6 Workers," ''New Art Examiner'', May 1978, p. 11. Her ''New Art Examiner'' essay "The Word vs. the Image – some thoughts on reading photography"Harmel, Carole. "The WORD vs. the IMAGE: some thoughts on reading photography," ''New Art Examiner'', December 1979, p. 8-9. was republished in ''The Essential New Art Examiner'' anthology (2011)Griffith, Terri and Kathryn Born, Janet Koplos, edsCollections and recognition
Harmel's work is held in numerous public and private collections, including those of: Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Illinois State Museum, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, State of Illinois Building, Taubman Museum of Art, Wellesley College, Kemper Insurance, Lake Shore Bank, Container Corporation, Muriel Newman, and Dennis Adrian. She has been awarded the Chicago Society of Artists' Prize (1973), a Polavision Grant (1977), an Illinois State Museum Purchase Prize (1985), and an Illinois Arts Council Grant (1986), among others.References
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