A life-size diorama greets visitors when they walk into photographer Patty Carroll’s studio in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood of Chicago. The eight-foot-tall by eight-foot-wide wood box is switched out for Carroll’s works of whimsy. On this afternoon in mid-July 2024 a female mannequin in a pleated cotton blend checkered dress is tending to a stable of nearly 40 chicken figurines. Ceramic hens are on the floor, a few more are perched on a red shelf and the rest are in wooden crates, all set within the diorama.
The mannequin is looking away. You cannot see her face.
Carroll will make a photograph of this scene. The work is called “Counting Chickens” and is part of Carroll’s “Anonymous Women” series that she launched in 2003. A couple of months before the anonymous chicken lady came to roost, the studio set featured a woman lost in a collection of ashtrays in a burnt orange setting called “Ashes to Ashes.”
More than 175 “Anonymous Women” have been photographed by Carroll over the years. Older pieces include “Canned,” (2018) where a woman’s head is buried under shelves with Campbell’s soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles, and “Gone Postal” where a traveling woman in a green pill-box hat lies on a floor in a field of more than 50 postcards and a half-dozen suitcases. The image “Newsie” (2018) is cast in a black-and-white setting of a woman on a sofa. Her head is under a newspaper and parts of more newspapers are scattered across the sofa and floor. These photographs examine the conflict between women and domesticity. Yet they deliver the message in a light way that has been a hallmark of Carroll’s 50-year career.
Her books include “Anonymous Women,” “Anonymous Women: Domestic Demise,” “Living The Life: The World of Elvis Tribute Artists” and “Man Bites Dog: Hot Dog Culture in America,” a radiant collaboration with the Chicago food writer and Roosevelt University professor emeritus in history Bruce Kraig.
She brings color and reason into a black-and-white world.
We need more Patty Carroll.
“For me, color was always emotional,” Carroll says during a lengthy conversation in her studio. “There’s a visceral response you have to color whether you know it or not that you don’t have in black and white. Black and white is about light. Color is about a different kind of emotion. With bright colors, you feel elated and happy, if it’s somber colors there is a sadness to it. The emotion of color is what I was attracted to, as well as the visual part of it. Color was the right thing for me. It was like when we went darkroom to digital, I never looked back. Same thing with color. Although I did do a series of black and whites of suburban lawns; Park Ridge, Niles, Morton Grove. I like manicured bushes. A house might be ‘this big’ but they have the perfect lawn, the perfect bush and the perfect tree.”
Patty Carroll was born on Dec. 30 1946 in Ravenswood Hospital. “I was supposed to be born on Christmas,” she says with a smile. “I was going to be Christmas Carroll.”
She grew up in northwest suburban Park Ridge and graduated from Regina Dominican High School in Wilmette. Carroll’s parents founded and owned the Park Ridge Advocate newspaper. Her mother Carol Carroll--yes that’s right--was the editor. Her father John W. “ Bill” Carroll was the publisher. She has a younger brother Mike who was also involved in the business. “In order to survive my family you had to have a sense of humor,” she says. “I’ve tried to put it in my work.”
Carroll thinks her sense of humor and self-described “weirdness” began to develop with Scoop, who was the family boxer when she was growing up. People would call her mother with gossip for the newspaper. “She always said she could not publish gossip,” Carroll says. “But after a while she decided the dog could have a column which included local lore and gossip. The column was called ‘Scoop Says’ and since the dog was writing it, it was a free for all.” The column ran with a picture of Scoop reading the Advocate with a pair of bifocals.
There is an accepting, childlike thread to Carroll’s photography because her young years offer some of her most powerful memories. “This started because we used to go to Florida every year since I was born,” she says. “It began in small motels in Miami, then North Miami, then Fort Lauderdale. Eventually my mother bought a condo in Pompano Beach. Remembering that resort area and the feeling of being a family----everybody’s not working all the time and arguing about what should be in the newspaper this week. It was kind of a nostalgia. Even though those places aren’t about that but for me they trigger some kind of memory.”
Her father was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives in 1956 where he eventually became majority leader. John Carroll (1901-1993) first worked under Governor William Stratton. Carroll was elected to the Senate in 1966. “My mother ran his campaign,” Carroll
says. “It was kind of fun. She had this big clown hat and wore it during the campaign. It was to keep everybody light. In the meantime the papers went on.”
John Carroll was kind of a Prairie William Randolph Hearst, but few people brought up conflict of interests. His daughter says, “That was then, this is now. It was a weekly. Every other week he was on the front page shaking hands with somebody. He retired from the Senate in 1973. I was just finishing graduate work at IIT at the Institute of Design. We had to write a 50-page thesis.”
Carroll’s thesis was to make black and white photographs of people on or near the beaches of South Florida or Chicago beaches in the summer. She explains, “I was interested in the edges of the frame and used (French impressionist Edgar) Degas as a reference. He had a photographic aspect to his paintings. He used the edge of the canvas as a visual device. We didn’t have computers then, so you had to have a typist for the thesis. My mother planned this big retirement party for my dad at the Park Ridge Country Club. Most of the time I was in blue jeans looking terrible. She called me every day, ‘Do you have an outfit yet?’ Do not come without your hair done! What about your nails?’ I did go to the party after going to the typist, taking my hair out of rollers at the typists house. I get there and it’s a big success and he retires.
“A couple years later (1975) the guy who took his place in the Senate, a young guy in his 50s dies. So my dad goes back. He was appointed until the end of the term. So they started all over again.” Carroll was a Republican and former chairman of the legislature’s bipartisan Advisory Commission on Public Aid. His work included helping to achieve ceilings on public aid payments.
Carroll purchased the Park Ridge Advocate in 1938, which was the first in his Pickwick Newspaper chain. The family’s other newspapers were in Morton Grove, Skokie, Franklin Park, Des Plaines, and Rosemont. He was a former president of the Illinois Press Association and was a board member of Goodwill Industries. He started his company in the back of the Pickwick building which also houses the art deco Pickwick Theater that opened in 1920. The theater was named by the Park Ridge mayor William Malone in honor of Samuel Pickwick in Charles Dickens’ “The Pickwick Papers.”
“We all worked there,” Carroll says. While in high school she answered phones and researched items in the newspaper morgue. “Later I did paste up,” she says. “We had to paste up pages. We had our own camera room where we shot the pages. With big Kodalith film (large film used for making one-to-one copies of pasted up pages of the newspaper.) I did that for years. We had linotype machines and small presses in the back. I did everything but set type. When I was a little kid there was this photographer who was always around. His name was John Stanks. He always smelled funny. It was from the darkroom. You could smell the hypo (hyposulfite of soda) on him. I didn’t know that until I took my first photography course as a senior in college.
“There was a big fight when I was going away to college. My parents were, ‘You have to go to Northwestern and go to journalism school, you have to run these papers.’ I was, ‘I don’t think so.’ When I would not take over the newspaper my brother did. Like my dad he sold ads and stuff. When we finally sold the papers we sold him with the papers to Pioneer Press. So he ran all of the classified ads for all of Pioneer Press for years.”
Carroll compromised with her parents on pursuing graphic design for a living. “I wanted to be a painter or something like that,” she says. She went to undergraduate school for graphic design at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign.). “That was informative about how to make pictures,” she says. “As a photographer you’re looking at the world for a variety of reasons, subject as well as content. The graphic design training is all about visual problem- solving. It is also about space, shape, lines and all the compositional elements that go into a photograph that you put in the back of your mind. Having that direct visual training with graphic design has helped me as a photographer.”
She references the 190-page “Man Bites Dog,” published in 2012 (AltaMira Press). Carroll made vivid pictures of hot dog stands and pushcarts in Chicago, New York, Coney Island, Los Angeles and other locales. Weenie scholar Bruce Kraig wrote the text. “This is kind of like folk art,” she says. “The signage. The colors. The whole thing with hot dog stands is that they were primary colors; yellow and blue and sometimes orange. I was always attracted to this kind of stuff as much as anything else.
“I couldn’t wait for color to come out. My first class in photography was as a senior at the University of Illinois. We had to start in black and white because that’s all there was. Color was introduced when I got to graduate school. We had a beginning color darkroom and you had to move the pictures where there was no light at all. (In black and white a yellow light or orange light enables the photographer to see what is going on. In color, the whole picture would turn orange.) Color was finally here! I photographed two artists friends of mine. Well, it was the 1970s. They were naked and they started painting themselves and each other. They ended up looking like dolls with color paint.”
Carroll giggles and adds, “They finally threw me out of the color darkroom because I was taking up too much time. I was a graduate student and undergraduates needed time in there. After that color became a regular thing.”
Carroll had been shooting Chicago hot dog stands since the 1980s and Kraig would show her work at lectures. Some of her hot dog portraits are part of the collection at the Chicago History Museum. Kraig suggested the book.
Carroll captured the timeless Cozy Dog on Route 66 in Springfield, Il. and Carney’s hot dogs in a Los Angeles railroad car, but one of her most compelling images is that of a young Black boy holding a toy gun in 1987 at Fat Johnnie’s Famous Red Hots at 72nd and Western. “Fat Johnnie was there at the time,” she said. “He really was this big guy who barely fit through the window. Bruce talked to the people. I took the pictures. If it was square (image), I was probably using my Hassleblad. If it was rectangular, I was probably using a Leica or a Nikon. It was all spur of the moment.” One of her favorite hot dog food memories is the Sonora Hot Dogs, grilled, wrapped in bacon and topped off with pinto beans, chopped onions, mayo, and shredded cheese.
Carroll is married to Tony Jones, the former President of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She met the UK native during the controversial 1989 “Flag on the Floor” exhibit at the School of the Art Institute. They had been married a few years when they moved into a nice loft in Printer’s Row. “We were there for less than a year and he got a job running the Royal College of Art in London,” she says. “So we went to London for four years. The ‘Anonymous Women’ series started when we were living in England in the 1990s. We left Chicago where I had a life as Patty Carroll. We got to London and I was suddenly ‘Mrs. Jones.’ Trust me, that’s a big leap for somebody like me.”
A model would visit her London studio on a weekly basis. At first Carroll applied white clown-like makeup to her face creating a statuesque image. “Because I’m a white woman,” she says succinctly. Carroll then started placing domestic items on her head such as cooking utensils or a drape. She began to call her mysterious photographs un-portraits. She was being seen through her domestic status. “There was a strong reaction,” Carroll says.
“When we came back from London I dropped it. Then in 2003 my niece Kathleen became an officer in the Marine Corps. She was at the Pentagon and the Iraq War happened. Suddenly she was shipped off to Iraq. She sent back this picture of herself sitting on the desert floor with her huge gun next to her, completely sunburn just looking forlorn. I started thinking about these women in Iraq, through no fault of their own are losing their homes. In the middle of this we had just bought this 1950s ranch house in Indiana. It had the original 1950s pink kitchen which I made more pink. So I’m obsessing about this house, making more pictures and I get this picture from Kathleen. The whole idea of home became an immense, overwhelming thing.”
One afternoon Carroll was removing the “awful” drapes in the bedroom of her house near Michigan City, In. At the time her friends Joel Klaff and John Diekmann operated the Workroom Couture drapery shop on Belmont Avenue. “Joel and I used to collaborate on things at INTUIT, (The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago)” she says. “ I went from the (mannequin) woman with stuff on her to camouflaging her with draperies. As the series went on I would add props.”
Carroll often makes clothes for her mannequin models, especially when they have to match the background. In one of her images about kitchen life she added a stock photograph of a stove. “But the guy that was renovating this building saw that I was doing this picture and said, ‘Oh, I got a toaster oven, do you want it?’,” she says. Carroll and her assistant and studio manager Andie Meadows hung the toaster into the installation. That’s getting the community involved in your art. “That’s kind of how this happens,” she explains. “As it went on the stuff became more and more elaborate. Eventually the stuff took over. She became overwhelmed by all her crap. The idea of the newspaper one was that we are inundated with too much information all the time, but we had to do it with newspapers.”
Eventually, the Chicago Cultural Center hosted Carroll’s “Anonymous Women” exhibit in the summer of 2012 and in 2016 the coffee table book “Anonymous Women” was released (Daylight Books). The women are often in assorted states of disaster overwhelmed by material goods. “You never see their faces,” she says. “The best response I get is from women who walk around the show and say, ‘That one is me.’ They relate to the domestic situation we’ve created, whether it collections of crap, a kitchen scene or multi-tasking. We did a couple of Pride pictures. Most people don’t want these in their house but every now and then you have to make a picture because you’re annoyed.” She points to “Seeing Red” (2020). A woman smoking a cigarette is sitting on a red lounge chair in front of a red drapery watching four television sets with Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett on each screen--drenched in red.
Considering how evocative and everlasting Carroll’s work is, she has flown under the radar in Chicago. In 2023 she had her first exhibition in Paris when Galerie XII Paris showed 20 of her photographs at their gallery and several stations of the Paris Metro. “I haven’t had many shows in Chicago,” she says. “For one thing I was gone. And I did have a gallery (One After 909 in Ukrainian Village) for a while but during the Pandemic he went out of business. I have a gallery in Kansas City (Mo.) I have a gallery in Houston. And Dallas. And Los Angeles and Paris. I’ve had a lot of shows and a lot of work in places---just not in Chicago. It’s typical. (She laughs).”
Carroll is former Adjunct Full Professor at the School of the Art Institute, in 1997 she was a visiting artist in photography at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI. and between 1992 and 1996 she was a senior tutor in photography at the Royal College of Art in London.
Carroll and Jones returned to Chicago in 1997 from his five-year stint at the Royal College of Art in London and he resumed duties at the School of the Art Institute. “The whole time I’m teaching wherever we are,” she says. “Finally he retires (in 2011). Our life is good. I’m still teaching part-time. Everything is fine.” And then, in December 2014 the Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI) called Jones.
“They said we’re in trouble and we need somebody to straighten us out,” Carroll recalls. “It was, ‘Could you just come for 18 months?’ We have a house in Indiana. He had planted trees all along the driveway, planted more bushes and trees along the side. Then he planted more so we didn’t have to see the house across the street. We were running out of room. So I was very encouraging. Take this job, 18 months, no big deal,” and she stops. Then she continues,
“We were in Kansas City for seven years.” And then Jones retired for good in June 2022.
“We just got back two years ago,” she says. “The whole time I was coming back and forth from Chicago.” The Chicago studio kept humming with the help of Meadows, her studio manager for the past decade. “Andie and I were making these pictures here of the women,” Carroll explains. “I’d go out of town and she’d do other things like build the (studio) box.”
Carroll also had a large studio in Kansas City and did still lifes from Kansas and Missouri. “There’s chickens everywhere there,” she says. “So I collected these chicken figurines. Mostly ceramic. I’ve got boxes of these chickens. I can’t get rid of something until I make a picture with it. That’s the impetus. We can do ‘Corny’ for the Midwest. ‘Squashed.’ The titles are all kind of puns and ridiculous.”
At first glance the chicken photographs seem quirky, but then Carroll explains how her series of bird photography informed the chickens. “When I was working I would hear the birds in the trees but you would never see them,” she says. “They were camouflaged in their homes just like the women are in their homes. I used decorative birds that were domestic items and fake flowers. The chickens were an offshoot of the birds.”
She installed “Counting Chickens” just a few days before our conversation. “It was an issue of how we were going to display the chickens,” she explains. “We went through various kinds of furniture and thought of crates. Andie found a guy that was selling these crates for five bucks a piece.”
The most work is for Carroll and Meadows to build the set. They tweak the wooden box with lights. The set is always in the same northern space of the studio. The posture of the mannequin is in flux. “You see all these mannequin parts?,” Carroll says while nodding to a
shelf of dismembered mannequin appendages. “It’s kind of mix and match. We use a lot of tape.”
Carroll and Meadows recently installed the permanent 309-square foot “Panther Room” at the 21c Museum Hotel, the former Savoy Hotel and Grill building in downtown Kansas City, Mo. The tropical room includes a king-sized bed, HDTV and bathroom. “The picture (“Panther” 2020) is from a collection of my panthers in my basement in Indiana,” she says with a hearty laugh. “It was the fastest picture we ever made because I brought the furniture and panthers from Indiana. Actually someone from INTUIT sold my husband the picture (bas-relief panther on a savannah) and he gave it to me as a present. So I made this picture of a woman (in black) crawling along like a panther. 21c buys a lot of art. They saw this picture at Expo Chicago.” About a month after the purchase, Alice Gray Stites, 21 c’s chief curator and museum director asked her if she would like to do a room based on the picture.
Carroll was all in. And now there are 18 panthers along a shelf going around the room, three panther lamps and a large panther holding up a coffee table. Oh, and there is a large panther outside of the hotel room door. “We had a huge budget,” she says. “I bought materials and had the drapes made. I figured out the carpet and the furniture. And the picture is in the room. It took a long time to pull that together. I was working with the curatorial-art people, but then the hotel people helped. I got this fabulous fabric for the drapes. They asked if it was flameproof. I didn’t know. So we sent it this bulk of fabric to New Jersey to get flameproofed.”
Carroll does wonder who will curate and preserve her archives. She and Jones don’t have kids. “I don’t know yet,” she says. “That’s the issue. I have drawers filled with stuff.”
So Carroll continues to move forward.
A wall in her studio features a new 40” by 40” portrait (with frame) called ‘Platey.’ It consists of a mannequin woman with a plate over her face in a field of painted plates. “Some are Japanese plates from right after World War II,” Carroll says while looking at the photograph. “They are all hand-painted. I found that collection. As usual, we take something I’ve found and make a picture so I can get rid of them. I found the landscape tree background on the internet and re-colorized it to go with the picture. I printed it. Then we put the plates on that. We hung the plates and put her in the middle. The plates cost like a buck, five bucks a piece. I found a few more. And then a few more. And more. Finally, I decided to put them up in our house in (Prairie Village) Kansas. Everybody said, ‘Oh, my this is fabulous!’ Anyway, I started this and suddenly Tony is on eBay finding landscape plates.”
And in September 2024 her Paris gallery Galerie XII arranged with the high-end Roche Bobois furniture in Paris to display her photographs in their large showroom in Montparnasse. Carroll also wanted to make a photograph with their furniture, so they sent a “bubble” chair from their New Jersey warehouse as well as an Ottoman to her studio. Carroll stops and glances at her “Anonymous Women” book. She looks at “Clockwork” (2018), a black and white image of a woman whose head is covered by a clock surrounded by seven more clocks and a vintage alarm clock in front of her. The caption reads, “It’s no use going back to yesterday because I was a different person then.”
So there are more women on the way. “It gets more elaborate and I hope it gets sillier,” she says, casting beauty and light into our heavy world.----Dave Hoekstra.
