Carucci, Elinor

Elinor Carucci is an Israeli-American photographer and educator who creates autobiographical works to tell stories of relationships, family, and the body. Her decade-long series, Mother, is an intimate documentation of her own pregnancy, labor, and motherhood. It confronts viewers with candid depictions, from her changing body to moments of annoyance, frustration, and exhaustion, but also those of great joy and tenderness. Carucci’s Midlife series portrays life approaching the age of fifty and entering menopause. In this work, photographs of attempts to remain psychologically balanced and youthful in appearance are coupled with close-up images of blood, a longtime symbol of fertility and the female body. In one poignant image, Carucci’s uterus lies starkly on a medical cart just after her hysterectomy. Her name on a tag reveals her connection to the now unneeded organ that once housed her two children. As a meditation on the cycles of life and mortality, this image is a powerful metaphor for aging and the grieving that often accompanies it. Also included in the series are images of Carucci’s sexual intimacy with her husband, augmenting her bold look at the physical and mental struggles of losing fertility with a hopeful meditation on the longevity of sensuality and pleasure.

Elinor Carucci is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2002) and a NYFA Award (2010). Her work is housed in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Houston Museum of Fine Art, among others. She was included in the Museum of Contemporary Photography exhibitions Home Truths: Photography and Motherhood (2014) and Reproductive: Health, Fertility, Agency (2021). She is a professor of photography at the School of Visual Arts, New York.