"Photography is my way to feel more, to connect to the people around me. It started with the people very close to me and has been expanding ever since."
Ever since its invention in the 19th century, photography has documented life. At the same time, it focuses on inviting audiences to a rather subjective world, while trying to be taken seriously as an art form. Photography has always been considered a male-dominated profession, but luckily things are changing. Scholars, writers, bloggers, photography students, and enthusiasts have been giving due to the female pioneers of the field. Most were always standing and/or hiding in the shadows, oblivious to how much they could acclaim and accomplish. Arguably, the techniques, concepts, and thematic female photographers use differ from those of male photographers. At a time when most women were convinced that their place was in the kitchen and certainly not in the dark room, some were struggling to surpass their male counterparts and work towards gaining respect and recognition for their work.
Elinor Carucci (Israeli-American photographer and educator, 1971-) was born in Jerusalem to a Mizrahi Jewish family of North African, Middle Eastern, and Italian descent. In 1995 she graduated 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 The Jewish Museum, Edwynn Houk Gallery, Fifty One Fine Art Gallery, James Hyman and Gagosian Gallery, London. Some of her most noticeable group shows include The Museum of Modern Art New York and The Photographers' Gallery, London. Carucci's 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 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 Infinity Award for Young Photographer in 2001, The Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, and NYFA in 2010. Carucci has published five monographs to date; Closer, Diary of a Dancer, Crisis, Mother, and Midlife. She teaches at the graduate program of Photography and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts and is represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery.
The artist revealed to an interviewer that she tries to find universal meaning in things that are personal to her. She admires the work of Mary Ellen Mark and Sally Mann, who embody what she calls "Two opposite extremes in her own work: Some of her photographs are spontaneous snapshots, like Mark's while other images are carefully staged, more like Mann's". Carucci is one of the most autobiographically rigorous photographers of her generation and continues her immersive and up-close examination of life in her most recent work, Midlife.
In this volume, she recruits and revisits the same family members of her that we have seen since her work gained prominence two decades ago. In Midlife, Carucci chronicles these pivotal years in vibrant detail to depict the complex, layered aspects of life that intimately affect men and women alike. As women increasingly claim territory for their narratives and topics of well-being, aging, women's health, and the portrayal of women in media continue to draw attention in the national discourse, Midlife is a document that asks us all to share the experience of this artist's life, looking closely and to collectively see what is so often invisible.
"The camera is, in a sense, both a way to get close and to break free. It is a testimony to independence as well as a new way to relate to the world."
"Mom is being crazy", 2017.
We will continue talking about female names that left their mark on photography and about contemporary female photographers who are still to emerge. There are a lot of female photographers out there deserving of praise and we can only hope to cover as many of them as we can. Please follow this space to find out more.
