In Midlife, Carucci confronts the realities of aging and transition.
Over seven years, she turned the camera on herself and her family to explore common themes of physical change, identity, and mortality, particularly from the perspective of womanhood in midlife.
Her documentation of a hysterectomy, shifting parental roles, and emotional recalibrations creates a portrait of this life stage as complex, charged, and deeply human. Some photographs are paired with paintings made from her own blood.
As The New Yorker wrote, “In Midlife, Carucci confronts the often-overlooked realities of aging and womanhood. Her photographs highlight the details and imperfections of her own body and her family’s everyday life, emphasizing signs of aging such as gray hair, wrinkles, and changes in physical appearance. By focusing closely on these features, she elevates them with a sense of gravity and drama, challenging societal norms that dictate women’s aging should be invisible…”
“One of the most beautiful and rich elements that came with age was my relationship with my husband Eran, and the deep sense of trust and friendship that came with years of marriage, but also how ‘partnership,’ which is many times perceived by the culture we live in as something that can overtake the romantic void, the feeling of team stronger than the feeling of couple at times, is seen as a negative aspect. We learn to think that there is a problem in the relationship if this happens, that we need to make time for romance, ‘make’ a date happen, force a ‘romantic’ weekend in some hotel. But all those notions made me angry. Why can’t these ‘teamwork’ and partnership elements, those intense parenting collaborations and discoveries, the deep commitments, be appreciated for what they are? I wanted them to be my middle-aged triumph. Because they are. This is romantic to me. This is love. Those photographs taken after my many years with Eran are celebrating our middle age. They are winners.
Middle age. Midlife crisis. Midlife. It is my midlife years, with the laughter and the jokes I make with my friends about the comic aspects of an aging body, ours, and the wisdom which indeed, as the cliché says, comes with age. The appreciation of certain times in our lives somehow allows for ‘more’ out of seemingly ‘less’: less time remaining, less need to prove, even fewer internal organs. Last year of elementary school for the kids, last year of middle school, the final years with our parents. I know I must love, touch, and laugh. Every year that goes by, I joke more, I try to laugh more, I have to. I feel more and hurt more and fear more. I love more. And I am only halfway through.” (From Carucci’s text in Midlife*)*
About Elinor Carucci
Born in 1971 in Jerusalem, Elinor Carucci graduated in 1995 from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design with a degree in photography. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions worldwide, including solo shows at Edwynn Houk Gallery, Fifty One Fine Art Photography Gallery, Fotomuseum Antwerp, and Gagosian Gallery in London, among others, as well as group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, and The Photographers’ Gallery in London.
Her photographs are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the International Center of Photography, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Haifa Museum of Art. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Details, WIRED, Men’s Health, New York Magazine, W, People, Aperture, ARTnews, and numerous other publications.
Carucci was awarded the ICP Infinity Award in 2001, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, and was named a NYFA Fellow in Photography in 2010. This is her fourth monograph, following Closer (Chronicle, 2002/2009), Diary of a Dancer (SteidlMack, 2005), and Mother (Prestel, 2013).
Carucci teaches in the graduate program of Photography and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts and is represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York and Fifty One Fine Art Photography Gallery in Belgium. She lives and works in New York City. [Official Website]
