Carole Harmel

Harmel quickly gained recognition for her nudes, which were described as provocative, compelling and disturbing in their suggestion and psychological acuity,[1][12] and deft in the use of color, texture and composition.[17][18] 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."[19] 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 solarization and toning to further remove the images from objective reality.[1][20] 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."[17]

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.[17][12] 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.[12] 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.[18][21]

Carole Harmel, Bird series, hand colored B&W silver gelatin print, 10" x 10", 1983.

In the 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 images[22] of a nude female and an undefinable birdlike creature hinting at intimacy.[23][24] 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."[24]

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."[17] 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 Weston's and Bullock's photographs of women.[25]

In 1984, Harmel began creating still life series that retained a surrealist edge recalling 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."[26]

Carole Harmel, Not a Bed of Strawberries, archival ink jet, 5" x 7", 1994.

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.[5] 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.[27]

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.[10] 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.[4]

Carole Harmel and Lialia Kuchma, A Creature/Ecriture, archival ink jet and thread, 8.5 x 17.7, 2013.

In the 2000s, Harmel's work took an increasingly collaborative turn. She worked with her husband, painter Arthur Lerner, on her "Facing 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.[28] She followed with "Another Iliad" (2016), which invited artists to paint, draw and collage over photographs she took on the site of Troy.

"Chicago Odyssey" instigated another collaboration, "Re-Woven" (2013), with Harmel's one-time Artemisia co-member Lialia Kuchma. Kuchma cast herself as Penelope in the "Odyssey" series, and put her weaving skills to use in her contribution. That inspired new works, incorporating French and English language puns (e.g., A Creature/Ecriture or Fin/Fin) and a larger narrative on the stations of life, in which Kuchma cut Harmel's prints into strips and re-wove them, drawing a "net" over the image.[29] In 2018, Harmel created another collaborative series, "A Clowder of Cats," in which her cat, Mica, "enters" the works of 22 Chicago artists.