Carol Schiraldi is a Texas-based fine art photographer, former database architect, accidental surrealist, part-time night wanderer, and full-time collector of strange light. She has spent the last several decades photographing things that normal people walk past without noticing: haunted hotel hallways, glowing koi ponds, suspicious church ceilings, reflections pretending to be reality, and doors that look like they definitely contain either enlightenment or tax fraud.
Her artistic process involves long exposures, layered time, experimental techniques, existential curiosity, and occasionally standing in the middle of a street muttering, “Wait…what if I zoom the lens during the exposure?”
Carol’s work drifts somewhere between dream, memory, architecture, and “Did I just accidentally photograph another dimension?” Critics have called it atmospheric, psychologically resonant, and cinematic. Carol has called it, “Well, that turned out weird in a good way.”
Before becoming an artist, she survived the tech world, including Amazon, where she worked in software quality engineering and AI-adjacent systems before escaping into photography like a Victorian woman fleeing a tuberculosis sanatorium. This explains why she can discuss both lens diffraction and relational database normalization with equal intensity at dinner parties no one invited her to.
She maintains a blog that has existed since 2002 — making it older than some influencers, several social media platforms, and possibly civilization itself. The blog contains thousands of entries documenting art, travel, philosophy, cats, airport rituals, abstract light squiggles, and the ongoing realization that creative people are fundamentally just raccoons with better scarves.
Her current projects include:
- photographing every bed she sleeps in while traveling,
- making abstract light images that resemble interdimensional weather systems,
- turning gardens into psychological landscapes,
- and quietly plotting world domination through licensing deals, poetic captions, and mysterious square-format images of red doors.
She is frequently found:
- carrying too many memory cards,
- explaining why blur is emotional,
- drinking tea in foreign hotel bars,
- talking to artists about “the psychological architecture of seeing,”
- or trying to convince people that a ceiling vault is actually a metaphor for consciousness.
When not making art, Carol can be spotted fighting with Mailchimp authentication settings, resisting overly salesy captions, and wondering whether she should get bangs.
No one knows exactly what she is doing.
Including Carol.
For those who want a less unhinged bio, you can read the “hinged” one here.
Until next time…
