Elinor Carucci

Born 1971 in Jerusalem, Israel, Elinor Carucci graduated in 1995 from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design with a degree in photography and moved to New York that same year. In a relatively short amount of time, her work has been included in an impressive amount of solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Solo shows include Edwynn Houk gallery, Fifty One Fine Art Gallery, James Hyman and Gagosian Gallery, London among others. Group shows include The Museum of Modern Art New York and The Photographers’ Gallery, London.

Her photographs are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art New York, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Houston Museum of Fine Art among others and her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Details, New York Magazine, W, Aperture, ARTnews and many more publications.

She was awarded the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award for Young Photographer in 2001 and The Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. Carucci has published two monographs to date, Closer (Chronicle Books, 2002) and Diary of a Dancer (SteidlMack, 2005). Her defining first book Closer is now available in a second edition with a new foreword by Susan Kismaric (Curator, Department of Photography, MoMA). Carucci currently teaches the graduate programme at the School of Visual Arts and is represented by Sasha Wolf Gallery, New York.

In spring 2014 Prestel publishing will publish her third monograph that will show 10 years of her motherhood project. The book’s temporary and possible final title is MOTHER

Mother – 2003-2013 – Prestel Publishing, 2014

“I have been photographing my children, Eden and Emmanuelle since I got pregnant in 2003. I photograph as a mother, from a mother’s point of view, showing the different aspects of motherhood as I see it, the beautiful and the ugly, the magic and the frustration, the extremes that live side by side when you are a mother. I try to photograph them all.

Crying, sadness, anxiety, mourning the body I will never have again, the woman I will never be again. The strong physical connection to the children, erotic at times, something I found out many mothers experience but not talk about much.

The need to photograph becomes even stronger since the passing time is so apparent in children’s life, every week is different, and the stages they go through just fly by.

Moments that will never come back happened every day in front of my eyes, escaping my camera, I had to preserve them somehow, at least some of them, a need parents share, we need to take pictures of our children, whether we are professional photographers or not.

The photographer in me sometimes fights the mother, the two can be conflicted, but recently became one, made peace. With this work I want to create a universal, honest and not beautified portrayal of motherhood”.