About Mark Harmel. . .

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Working in college as a peer drug counselor, group facilitator and teen run-away youth care worker helped make Mark Harmel extremely sensitive to gesture and expression.

“Sixty percent of communications is nonverbal,” says the California photographer. As a counselor, “I learned more from wary eyes that avoided mine or tentative smiles signaling the beginning of recovery than from words we shared.”

                             

As he turned his attention towards photography, Harmel says, “ I learned to take what is visual about a person and create a picture that helps communicate some essential element, whether it is to teach, or to comfort or to advertise.”

“Photography,” he says, “ is, at its core, nonverbal communication captured forever in a form that can create an enduring memory. My role as a photographer is to find the essence of a person or a scene, to blend both art and meaning."

                             

Harmel’s images span a wide range of subjects from nature to people. Currently, he spends much of his time concentrating on healthcare photography. Harmel recently worked with and his wife, Dr. Anne Peters, a physician specializing in diabetes, to create a best-selling book on the disease. The book, Conquering Diabetes is published by Penguin Books and has been featured on Larry King Live. It hit the top-ten seller lists at both Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com. ( Click here to learn more about the book. )

The photographer's work has been used by companies like Orvis, Warner Brothers, Fannie Mae, Presidio Trust, Blue Cross, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Cedars-Sinai Health Care System. He has also been published in Time, the Wall Street Journal, Research Magazine and Brandweek. Three of Harmel's images of The Gates, a Christo and Jeanne-Claude installation in New York's Central Park, are featured in the 2005 Communication Arts Photography Annual.

Harmel’s stock photography is available through Getty Images,
Workbookstock.com and Alamy. He is a member of American Society of Media Photographer, Advertising Photographers of America, Editorial Photographers and StockArtistsAlliance. He recently wrote a Stock Asylum article about his experiences shooting travel photography in France. To read the article, click here.