Elinor Carucci

Elinor Carucci (born 1971) is an Israeli-American photographer and educator, living in New York City, noted for her intimate porayals of her family's lives.

She graduated in 1995 from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design with a degree in photography and moved to New York City.

She currently teaches in the graduate program of photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Carucci told an interviewer that she tries to find universal meaning in things that are personal to her.

She admires the work of Nan Goldin and Sally Mann, who embody what she calls two opposite extremes in her own work: Some of her photographs are spontaneous snapshots, like Goldin's while other images are carefully staged, more like Mann's.

Carucci's first monograph, Closer, contains her earlier work focusing on immediate family and her closest relationships.

Crisis (2001–2003) narrates a tumultuous time in her marriage.

Taking place at a time when her and her husband were working through her infidelity and mind-body induced physical pain and his marijuana usage, these photographs look straight into the darkness of post-arguments, as well as at their tender moments.

Carucci has described how photographing this process brought them closer together, as they ultimately demonstrated to each other in the taking of these photographs that their love for one another is held above all else.

Photographing was a way of reconnecting.

She has published four monographs; Closer (2002), Diary of a Dancer (2005), Mother (2013) and Midlife (2019).

She teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Carucci's work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Jewish Museum and Brooklyn Museum in New York, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and Harwood Museum of Art in New Mexico.

Carucci was born in Jerusalem.

Her second monograph, Diary of a Dancer (2005), documents Carucci's experience as a professional Middle-Eastern belly dancer entertaining at events like weddings and bar/bat mitzvahs in the five boroughs of New York City.

Her husband, Eran, helped her to capture photographs of herself dancing.

The images in this series depict Carucci preparing for jobs and applying makeup in dismal looking bathrooms and on subway rides, snapshots of her dancing and images of the people she was entertaining.

Midlife (2011–2019) chronicles the years of middle of life, a time that is overlooked by our culture and society, especially in women's life.

It explores themes of women's bodies and health, intergenerational relationship, love and marriage over decades, children getting older, and brings attention to the beauty and challenges of this period of time in women's life.

Carucci's work is held in the following permanent collections:

Carucci's third monograph, Mother (2013), "documents ten years of New York City-based child rearing."

Beginning during the pregnancy of her twins and ending when they turn eight years old, she explores the complex realities of motherhood in images that show her joys and the pains, the beautiful and the ugly, and the love and dysfunctions.

Mother also shed light on the sensual and erotic connections between mother and child in photographs reflecting the range of Carucci's experience, from bliss to the less attractive raw moments.

A Time Lightbox article from 2013 summarizes the work as chronicling

"'her tumultuous relationship with her husband and parents through incidents of infidelity (hers) too much dope (her husband’s) and her parents fractious relationship and eventual divorce. The mood was gentle, though, with plenty of high notes; the everyday ebb and flow of relationships were lovingly and lavishly documented, while the larger narratives played out in the background.'"