Elinor Carucci’s work has always focused on the everyday — the raw, joyful, exposed, and exposing business of humans who love each other sharing a space. And Carucci’s own domesticity has never been so intense nor so constrained. Carucci is sheltering in place in her 950-square-foot Manhattan apartment with her husband, Eran, and their teenage twins, Eden and Emmanuelle. With work, exercise, mealtime, and virtual socializing, the family tries to maintain some semblance of normalcy, but results are mixed. “I feel like I’m getting a little used to it,” says Carucci, who is Israeli. “But at the beginning, I had a lot of flashbacks to the Gulf War.” – Lisa Miller
Over the course of her career, curator and lecturer Sasha Wolf has heard countless young photographers say they often feel adrift in their own practices, wondering if they are doing it the “right” way. She was inspired to seek insight from a wide range of photographers about their approaches to making photographs, and, more important, a sustained body of work. Their responses are compiled in PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice. Below, twelve artists respond to the first question in the interview series:
Everything is personal for Elinor Carucci. If you ask her for an interview, for example, there’s a chance she might invite you to her home in New York City. If you arrive, say, voiceless with laryngitis, she might offer you tea. Sitting in her living room, you may notice the panels of black seamless next to kids’ drawings amid copies of her monographs and bikes mounted on the exposed brick wall. You may sit on a low sofa and sip green jasmine together. In five minutes you will have become like old friends.
It starts with her pregnant with twins and concludes when they are 8 years old – a moment when Caruccci saw a change and a growing independence in her children. The intimacy and sensuality for which she has become so well known is amplified and, as she says in her introduction, she has never seen so much as she does as a mother. Her gaze has certainly become more intense, and her actions stronger, as she hugs, dresses, holds, licks, pulls, feeds, caresses and cares for her children.
