Art Walk Artist Bio 3

Carole K. Harris:I have been taking photos since my grandfather gave me an old Brownie camera when I was eleven. I continue to use a manual 35- millimeter camera, a Canon AE-1. This was a gift from my father, who taught me to have a keen eye for the flora and fauna of our native state, Virginia. Whereas some people may take photographs to escape the familiar, I take photographs to record what is startling in the everyday. I am currently writing a collection of essays on the topic of clichés in American short story writer Flannery O’Connor’s fiction. Clichés are overly used phrases that we tend to dismiss as dead expression. The word cliché comes from the French and was originally invented in the nineteenth century to designate the metal plate from which photographs were reproduced. O’Connor’s playful attention to verbal clichés resonates with the way I pause over an everyday image or scene–a motel, a café, a dormitory, a subway bench, a parking lot, a churchyard, a city block, a playground, a rooftop– and capture it in an unexpected and perhaps surprising light. These photos are from a larger series entitled “Route 441: Signs from Flannery O’Connor’s Milledgeville,” which traces my journey on foot from Andalusia, the family farm on the outskirts of O’Connor’s hometown (Milledgeville, Georgia), to Memory Hill, the cemetery in the center of town where O’Connor is buried. With her cartoonist’s eye for the absurd, O’Connor would have loved the clash of cultures I witnessed along Route 441–between mall and memorial, car wash and chapel, tattoo parlor and family farm.

See Carole's work at Bierkraft. To download an Artwalk map, click here.

OOPS! UPDATE!: Carole's work is actually hanging in Ellis Bar. Feel free to drop by Bierkraft, anyway!

For the latest Artwalk map, click here.