Carole Harmel
Carole Harmel (born 1945) is an American artist and photographer, who gained recognition for her provocative images of nudes in the 1970s and 1980s[1][2][3] and still lifes combining photography with short narratives, wordplay and mixed media.
[16] In 1979, Harmel began film studies at Northwestern University with professors Paddy Whannel, Stuart Kaminsky and Chuck Kleinhans, completing a PhD in 1982.
[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.
[18][21] 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.
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.
[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.
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.
Her contributions included reviews on André Kertész, Wynn Bullock,[30] contemporaries Keith Smith,[31] Jane Wenger,[32] Joseph Jachna and Harold Allen, and major exhibits.
[37] The essay examined the word/image relationship through the lens of theoretician Minor White's work on reading photographs and the emerging field of semiology, which related to Harmel's PhD research.
The following year, she transferred to Harry S. Truman College, where she would teach film, photography, art history and other subjects, including ceramics, to a diverse student body until retiring in 2007.
