Midlife: Photographs by Elinor Carucci

I was supposed to have gone on a trip to Israel earlier this month. Unfortunately, I had to cancel my plans owing to the current geopolitical situation in the Middle East.

One thing I had been especially looking forward to was a visit to the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv to see 20 & 20: A Lens of Her Own, an exhibition about trailblazing Jewish women photographers and their contemporary successors. Maybe I'll still get to see it before it closes, but until then, I thought I'd explore the work of some of the featured photographers through their books.

Elinor Carucci is one of the contemporary photographers in the show. When I looked her up, I realized I was already familiar with her work. Her unsettling photograph of a close-up kiss accompanied the 2017 New Yorker short story "Cat Person" (link here; subscription required) by Kristen Roupenian. That story, about a very bad first date, went viral just as the MeToo movement was exploding into our collective consciousness. Carucci also co-authored The Collars of RBG: A Portrait of Justice about the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the bold neckpieces she wore at the Supreme Court.

Born in 1971 in Jerusalem and now living in Brooklyn, Carucci has published several collections of provocative and revealing photographs, in which she frequently turns the camera on herself. In Midlife, published in 2019, she chronicles her complex relationship with her own aging body, the stark intimacies and banalities of daily life, and changing family dynamics with her husband, children, and parents as they, too, grow older. Warning: there's intergenerational nudity throughout these photographs, along with other subject matter that can be pretty shocking. I wasn't quite prepared for the intensity of Carucci's work, or how disarming it is.

Roupenian wrote the foreword. I typically skim those in art books, but I read the entire thing in this case because it offers a lot of insight into the meaning of Carucci's photographs. According to conventional wisdom, Roupenian notes, women in middle age start to feel invisible. But as is self-evident in these photographs, Carucci demands to be seen. Roupenian also observes that Carucci treats the evidence of aging — a recalcitrant gray hair or a wrinkled knuckle — with immense gravity that borders on the absurd. Yet, for any human being, and for women especially, aging is hugely consequential, and the impulse to document how it unfolds is completely relatable.

Photographer Elinor Carucci confronts middle age and family bonds in this intimate and emotional collection.

Interspersed throughout the self-portraits and family photographs are arresting shots of abstract red images. I wasn't sure what these were until I read the afterword, where Carucci explains they are photographs of paintings she made from her own blood. This sounds ghoulish, but they are strangely beautiful. Carucci says these paintings were inspired by her struggles with illness, as well as her fascination with the color red and its many associations: love, passion, anger, and birth.

My favorite photograph in the book, titled simply, "Laundry," is, on the surface, one of the most mundane. Carucci and her husband are crouching in what looks like the laundry room of their apartment building, with clothes strewn around them. They gaze at each other knowingly and tenderly, with Carucci's hand touching her husband's cheek. The door of one of the dryers is open, casting a hot, white glow that illuminates her as if she were in a Renaissance painting. The intense light is reminiscent of that of a space capsule or an MRI machine, seemingly offering the tantalizing possibility of transporting them to another dimension.

My second favorite photograph is "Mother is Mad." With the regal bearing of a 1940s movie star, Carucci's mother is clad elegantly in a houndstooth print top, a string of pearls, and bright red lipstick. She is looking away from the camera with a steely gaze. She has one manicured hand wrapped around an aluminum tray of raw meat, and the other clutching a canister of David's Kosher Salt. It can't be an accident that the canister is turned just so, with the Star of David on the label visible. Carucci is in the background, eyeing her mother warily. We don't know what is going on between them, but the photograph is clearly recognizable as a fraught mother-daughter moment, in this case with a distinctly Jewish undertone.

I thought a lot about these photographs after perusing the book, and I found myself returning to some of them, noticing details I did not spot the first time around. I also came away uneasy about Carucci's choice to include images of her children in the nude or in photographs with nude relatives, and I would be curious to hear her explain how she thinks about boundaries and consent in her art.

I typically don't spend much time looking closely at art books, and this book was a great opportunity to do just that. I'm also eager to learn more about other photographers featured in the Tel Aviv exhibition.