Patty Carrol
Patty Carroll is known for her use of highly intense, saturated color photographs since the 1970s. After teaching photography for many years, Carroll enthusiastically returned to the studio, delighting viewers with her playful critique of home and excess. Her ongoing project, Anonymous Women: Domestic Demise, is a series of studio installations made for the camera, addressing women and their complicated relationships with domestic life. In the still-life studio photographs (made on a full-size “stage” set) that humorously comment on the mania of running and decorating a home, the objects take over and lead to mishaps and mayhem for the lone figure of a woman. Carroll grew up in suburban Chicago, which influenced the entire series and has remained the locus of her work ever since.
The photographs are exhibited in large scale, and previous iterations were published as a monograph, Anonymous Women, in 2017 with Daylight Books. The more recent chapter of the ongoing series is a monograph Domestic Demise, published in 2020 by Aint-Bad Books. The series has been exhibited internationally, won multiple awards, and been acknowledged as one of Photolucida’s “Top 50” in 2014 and 2017. It has been featured in prestigious blogs and international magazines such as the Huffington Post, BJP in Britain, NYT LensBlog, Washington Post Insight, Vanity Fair, Italia, and many others. Most recently, Colossal ran a wonderful updated review in April 2024, and New City Chicago did an in-depth interview and featured her work in September 2024.
Artist Statement
In my ongoing series titled Anonymous Women: Domestic Demise, I am exploring the connection between a woman's identity and her home, specifically examining the term “housewife.” I create staged, full-size interior domestic rooms for the camera filled with decor and objects that surround (or hide) a solitary female figure. The fictional scene uses a mannequin, the substitute ideal woman, who does not move, complain, or age. In the set, the woman is both enveloped by her environment while creating it—a dichotomy with both fulfilling and problematic consequences; both pathetic and humorous.
In each image, I use color, design, and humor to entice the viewer to relate to the woman’s plight and circumstance. The figure stands in for so many women, who silently make the home a place of comfort, safety, and warmth, yet are unseen heroines of their own lives.
My photographs are metaphors for the interior lives of all women, represented here as the invisible suburban woman, often considered privileged but limited by outdated expectations, and largely ignored in today's identity politics. Though inspired by western consumer culture and the meaning we attach to material possessions, my female figures represent women from all backgrounds and cultures.
https://www.pattycarroll.com
