Patty Carroll
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 on a large scale, and previous iterations were published as a monograph, Anonymous Women, in 2017 with Daylight Books, Domestic Demise, published in 2020 by Aint-Bad Books, and a forthcoming book, Domestic Demise and Debacle, will be released in 2025 by Paper Street. The series has been exhibited internationally, has won multiple awards, and has been acknowledged as one of Photolucida’s “Top 50” in 2014 and in 2017. It has been featured in prestigious blogs and international magazines such as the Huffington Post, the BJP in Britain, NYT Lens Blog, 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 featuring 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 enveloped by her environment while creating it, with fulfilling and problematic consequences, pathetic and humorous. In each image, I use color, design, and humor to entice the viewer to relate to the woman’s plight and circumstances.
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 lives. Inspired by Western consumer culture and the meaning of material possessions (how belongings provide identity, continuity, and tradition), my female figures represent women from all backgrounds and cultures.
My photographs are metaphors for the interior lives of all women. Here, the invisible suburban woman is depicted, often considered privileged but limited by outdated expectations and largely ignored in today's identity politics.
www.pattycarroll.com
