Elinor Carucci

Elinor Carucci (b. 1971) is a New York based Israeli-American photographer. She is known as a fine art photographer although Carucci herself states she does not believe in genres. "Let's take, for example, the words fine art photography. I see art in many forms of photography, documentary photography, fashion photography, magazine photography. And many times I go to galleries to look at what I think will be art and recognize commercial ways of thinking, pieces being made in order to be used as decoration, in order to fit into trends that happen to be appreciated at the moment, in order to be sellable. I am making art. It is sometimes staged and sometimes a snapshot, sometimes conceptual and sometimes emotional, and sometimes, if I am lucky enough, both. Who cares. Fuck the genre." (Wolf, S. 2019. Photo Work: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice. p.31. First edition. Aperture, USA.)

Diary of a Dancer (2005). Carucci was a professional belly dancer for fifteen years.

When asked which comes first for her, the idea for he project or individual photographs, Carucci replies both things are happening simultaneously. "I can have an idea for a project and then take individual pictures that will lead me to change the project." (Wolf, 2019, p. 30)

She also often takes photographs she thinks are going to be about one thing, but end up being about another thing entirely. The key is "listening" to the pictures and understanding what the project is about.

Sometimes the projects are also affected by when a certain body of work comes to an end. For example the series Diary of a Dancer ended in 2005 when Carucci fell pregnant and could no longer perform. However for Closer (2002) it took years to find a publisher which actually turned the project into a decade of photographing and according to Carucci, made the book even better.