Elinor Carucci

Elinor Carucci draws inspiration from her personal life to create poignant photographs that contemplate identity, relationships, and the passage of time. By documenting her most intimate moments, Carucci highlights both the beautiful and imperfect aspects of the human condition through images that are at once deeply personal and evocative of universal experiences and emotions.

Carucci constructs her images with dramatic lighting and careful compositions, adding a heightened sense of theatricality to these otherwise candid domestic scenes. Each body of work that she creates responds to the broad range of emotions that she is experiencing at that particular phase of her life. In Closer (2002), she explores the complexities of her relationships with her parents, her husband, and herself. While these scenes are staged, the intensity of Carucci's relationships to her subjects fosters a palpable sense of authenticity in the images. Diary of a Dancer (2005) draws on the artist's experiences as a Middle Eastern professional dancer performing at events such as weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. Certain images from this series emphasize the liveliness and delight she experienced, while others are imbued with darkness and vulnerability.

Carucci's extensive series Mother (2013), chronicles the lives of her twin children, beginning with her pregnancy through their eighth birthday. These images retain the intimacy and even sensuality that she explored in earlier series as she underscores the everyday messy and tender moments of parenting. Mother documents the relationship between two siblings, the shifting role of a mother as her children grow up, and the ephemerality of childhood. While motherhood remains at the core of this work, Carucci also confronts notions of personal identity as an Israeli immigrant; her own sense of being grounded in New York City grows through the lives of her American born children, as they stroll through the city, play in playgrounds, and bicker on street corners.

In Midlife (2019) Carucci depicts a period in life that is rarely acknowledged, much less celebrated, particularly for women. More than simply shining a light on the midlife years, Carucci presents an intensive and tender investigation into the effects of time on her body, her self-identity, and her relationships with her family members as they each move through new stages of their lives. We see the artist at a crossroads between the three generations of her family, as well as in her own sense of self, as she uses the process of photographing to understand and reconcile changes, most notably the loss of her fertility. Carucci observes the rich partnership that has evolved in her decades long relationship with her husband, and returns her gaze to her parents, now from the perspective of being a parent herself. She zooms into the details of aging, displaying wrinkles and grey hairs with equal parts seriousness and melodrama.

In 2020 Time Magazine asked Carucci to document the collars of the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which led to her series and book The Collars of RBG. The collars themselves are internationally iconic, and although technically still lifes, Carucci transforms the works into a type of portraiture, meditating on their intimate proximity to this powerful woman. Their palpable physicality reminds the viewer of the powerful symbolism woven throughout the history of women's craft, decoration, costume, and jewelry, and the closeness to the body of one of the most powerful women in American history. Ginsburg’s collars evince a throughline in Carucci’s work of exploring strength and vulnerability via profound closeness to the human body. 

Elinor Carucci graduated from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem with a degree in photography in 1995, and moved to New York that same year. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Jewish Museum, New York, and the Haifa Museum of Art, among other institutions. She was the recipient of the ICP Infinity Award in 2001, the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, and was named the NYFA Fellow in Photography in 2010. Carucci has published five monographs to date, Closer (Chronicle Books 2002), Diary of a Dancer (SteidlMack 2005), MOTHER (Prestel 2013), and Midlife (Monacelli, 2019), and The Collars of RBG: A Portrait of Justice (with Sara Bader, Clarkson Potter, 2023).