How to Develop a Project: Elinor Carucci

© Elinor Carucci, Emmanuelle having her hair cut, from the series "MOTHER" 2007

During the last year, we published thirteen short essays from photographers to the basic question, "What advice do you have for starting a project?" The series featured replies from Judith Joy Ross, Irina Rozovsky, Alejandro Cartagena, Phil Toledano, Steven Ahlgren, Susan Lipper, Amani Willett, Lisa Kereszi, Eirik Johnson, Richard Renaldi, Brian Ulrich, Mark Steinmetz and Tim Davis.

Today we begin a follow-up series of posts of advice from photographers on how to develop a project, asking them how they approach the middle ground of their projects after giving basic definition and before taking steps to finish.

We start the series with a response from Elinor Carucci.

Born 1971 in Jerusalem, Israel, Carucci graduated in 1995 from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design with a degree in photography, and moved to New York that same year. In a relatively short amount of time, her work has been included in an impressive amount of solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Solo shows include Edwynn Houk Gallery, Fifty One Fine Art Gallery, James Hyman and Gagosian Gallery, London among others and group shows include The Museum of Modern Art New York and The Photographers' Gallery, London.

Her photographs are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Brooklyn Museum, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston among others and her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Details, New York Magazine, W, Aperture, ARTnews and many more publications.

She was awarded the International Center of Photography's Infinity Award for Young Photographers in 2001, The Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and NYFA in 2010. Carucci has published two monographs to date, Closer, Chronicle Books 2002, and Diary of a Dancer, SteidlMack 2005. Carucci currently teaches at the graduate program of photography at The School of Visual Arts and is represented by the Institute for Artist Management.

In the winter of 2013/14 Prestel will publish her third monograph, MOTHER, that will show nine years of her motherhood project. A show of this work will be exhibited at Edwynn Houk Gallery in NYC in March 27th, 2014.

______________________________

I know you asked about developing a project but the main thing to me is to make the first part of a project. And what is really crucial to me about starting a project is not to be afraid to fail - this fear can be very paralyzing - and to accept the fact that the project might not turn into a project and to start anyway.

Give yourself a certain amount of time to work before you make any decisions. Let yourself take pictures of what you put your heart into, and then see, and think, and see again. And continue working through the days where nothing comes out of a shoot, and the many mediocre images that happen. Look and think again, accepting at times that you are not sure what you are saying, but keep making work.

Then comes the stage of getting into a method or some sort of a system that will let the project grow. I guess this part is more what you asked about. I think that developing a working system, a structure, will get you into the discipline that is needed in order to start and finish a project. It depends on the project, but try to create some system of shooting in a certain method: keep the camera with you at all times, or try photographing once a week, or once a month for a long period of time, or if the project involves another person's life, make a schedule with them of when you can visit. Maybe try for once a month on a regular day and also once a month for an event they are having and commit to it.

The more you get into it, usually the more you will know what you are saying with it and, therefore, when to end it and call it a project. But I think that getting started and developing a working method is the most challenging part.

- Elinor Carucci

Progress and Problems, Part III

In posts one and two I’ve argued progress matters in art photography, but that we need to change how we consider the idea of progress to fit the contemporary historical moment. Today I want to build on those ideas and move into an article by Joerg Colberg on Conscientious that has generated conversation entitled "The digital revolution has not happened (yet)."

Colberg’s post boils down to an intriguing question: just where are the digital-based projects that take advantage of the inherent properties offered by a new technology to push the boundaries of the medium in ways not possible with analog?

I’d like to respond by first framing expectations. Whatever truly revolutionary element I would hold out for in the digital era for photography I would place in the broader impact of digital technology on the field and culture, and not in the actual making of images.

The digital era has brought massive change to photography, in how we make images and how we distribute images. Given this is obvious, let’s just list a few changes, some of which Colberg mentions in his article as well: the rise of citizen photojournalism, online image sharing, an exponential increase in images created, the further democratization of photography by lowering the bar of technical proficiency and costs, the embedding of metadata in images, and the explosion in the number of photographers considering themselves professional and the subsequent destruction of the traditional commercial photography market.

The main consequences of the digital era on photography have been broadly established by now and will continue to profoundly influence our medium for decades. This – in my view – was the “revolution” part of the digital revolution. No sense messing around with words, let’s light the fire: I believe that the “digital revolution” has largely happened already in photography through broader impacts on the field, not the actual production of individual projects and images.

In terms of projects and image-production, digital forms another link in an ongoing historical chain - dry plates, Brownie, Leica, Polaroid, etc. - and now digital. This chain has been about making cameras smaller, cheaper, more portable, and easier to use and digital has generally been developed, approached, and used in line with these expectations of previous new technologies. All have tried to maintain the quality of image of previous generations of cameras as much as possible while making photography more convenient. The Brownie, for example, put a camera in a lot more middle-class hands; that was its revolution. Similarly, dry plates eliminated the hassle of mixing chemicals in the field allowing more people to take more photographs and for them to travel to new places to take them. This was its revolution; not a particular photographer or project.

So in terms of expectations from a digital revolution, I'm not holding out for something shockingly new and shiny in terms of a project or image or a new genre of photography. What I hope for is an increase in the use of digital photography to create new form and content that harnesses the advantages of a new technology to speak in a new way that move the lines of visual communication forwards. I think that is possible with individual photographers and projects.

This brings us back to Colberg's question: where ARE the projects taking advantage of the properties of this new technology to create content? He’s on to something. There aren’t many.

As an exercise – how many 35mm digital photography fine art projects can you think of? And inside of that group, how many could not have been made with an analog camera and how many are actually using the new opportunities digital offers to create images (not including post-production manipulation that’s a whole other conversation)?

Not many. Why is this?

First off, this question doesn't ask about projects investigating the medium itself – projects where the subject is digital glitch or fringing, halos and strange digital color. Those types of projects are horrible necessary investigations of technology, but aren’t what we’re getting at.  There are a number of these projects already, and I believe projects where technology is also the subject are of limited potential as an avenue headed “forward” because they don’t use the new technology to say something new in terms of visual communication.

In exchange, going with Colberg's example of Nan Goldin we have someone who used the advantages of a smaller, cheaper, more portable technology to work with her everyday life and relationships. That’s what we’re after – the weaving of technological change into new form and content, projects that have been allowed by a technology that are not exploring the media itself, but exploiting the smaller size and increased portability and new aesthetic features of the newest camera evolution to create fresh visual communication.

There are some great projects that work with digital cameras, though not perhaps as many as you would expect. Elinor Carucci, Mark Powell, Phil Toledano to start a list. These projects, however, don’t answer Colberg’s call to take advantage of the inherent possibilites of digital – all could have been made with analog. One project that I believe DOES use digital capabilities to create new content is “a shimmer of possibility.” Paul Graham uses the high burst capability of the digital camera to create questions around “the moment,” framing, and the relationship of cameras to cinema that would have been hard, if not impossible, to pull off with an analog camera and a motor drive. This, however, even if true, is an exception to the rule.

Part of the reason might be the fact that digital cameras haven’t completely followed the trends of technological innovations of the past. Digital SLR cameras are not actually cheaper, more portable, or smaller than analog cameras. Only digital point-and-shoots and cell phone cameras continue the technological trend of smaller, cheaper, more portable and those cameras, at this point, continue to have fairly severe quality limitations. Perhaps when time brings them more quality, projects will be generated that use their inherent abilities to provide new form and content. Additionally, the larger digital SLR’s do offer ISO advantages, burst modes, perhaps facial recognition technology...but we’ll run out of items on this list quickly. Digital isn’t THAT much different from analog in terms of the ways a camera makes images.

Moving beyond a few speculations around the new technology itself, I think we are more likely to find answers hidden in the implied question behind Colberg’s question. He uses the conversation around the lack of projects taking advantage of digital properties to hint at something broader - why does photography feel “stagnant and anemic” today?

A qualifying statement is necessarily before I reply. First, there are a lot of great images being created right now, as Colberg says as well in his post. I would say there are probably more quality images being made today than at any point in history on a year-to-year basis give the sheer volume of photographers, the level of visual sophistication we’ve developed during the last 150 years, and the variety of modes of working available to us today as established over the course of photographic history.

So the question of “stagnant and anemic” isn’t about the quality of images; I think it's rather about the way those images relate very closely to images of the past and to each other, about how they orient themselves. Why do we seem to see the same projects over and over? The same types of images? And especially when we’ve just been handed a major new technological toy?

As I’ve said in parts I and II of this post, there needs to be an understanding that progress will be more limited in photography as photography grows older as a medium, and that progress is about a creation of fresh modes of working and visual communication by a photographer, not a movement. The situation needs to be considered correctly in terms of expectation and history.

That being said, let’s get to a list of possible answers to Colberg's question that I hope will provide for reply posts and further conversation on other sites. I would eventually like to expand on some of the following points as well as separate posts.

Not in any particular order:

1. Group-think due to social media and the centralization of information. As a cut-and-paste from a question I asked Blake Andrews in an interview recently: The social dynamic of the photography community in comparison with other visual art forms is a very particular and highly developed one. There are very few painting or sculpture blogs in comparison with photography blogs. Photographers also seem to me much more active on Twitter and other social media forms than other visual artists. And I'm not aware of an equivalent to online discussion spaces like the Flak Photo Network for other art forms.

With all this in mind, I think of a quote from a recent interview with photographer Gregory Halpern: "Photographers can sometimes be the most conservative and least ambitious of visual artists."

I'm wondering if all this connectivity, all this common intake of information, all this drinking from the same well results to a degree in homogeneity of thought and more of a tendency for group-think than other artists in other art forms. Why is the photography community so integrated socially as compared with other mediums? Is this something that makes us more prone to being conservative in our thinking, to homogenization and to group-think?

2. The limited guardians of the gate. Photographers attend reviews that don't exist for other art forms that in large part are about networking. Many of the same reviewers appear at Santa Fe, Photolucida, FotoFest, etc. The number of major photography blogs is actually fairly small, a dozen or two. Thankfully we’re not in the John Szarkowski era (nothing against him at all) in which a single person is really the definer of what is considered quality and contemporary in photography. However, the people in charge of selecting work to show in well-considered venues is not very large – and they mostly know each other and I believe are influenced at least to a degree by each other. We remain a community of too few guardians, and a lot of those guardians have a fairly similar vision.

If you give me a photograph, I think I can pretty much tell you if a certain blog or reviewer or gallerist or editor will respond to it and thereby predict your “success.” On top of that - and this is where the problem lies - the image's chances of success are fairly consistent across many of those venues. Seen a lot of the same names across a lot of sites, galleries, and at the top of awards lists? Out of hundreds of thousands of photographers? That’s not good.

3. Issues in the broader cultural zeitgeist. As John Armstrong noted in the recent Flak Photo Books conversation based in Gerry Badger’s “The Pleasure of Good Photographs” and as Colberg noted in his reference to Simon Reynolds, there is an almost fascinating lack of cultural movement in the 2000s across all disciplines, not just photography.

Think of how quickly you can associate music and art and a cultural atmosphere with the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s...now try the 2000s. It’s not for a lack of issues – September 11th, Obama, the Arab Spring, the US involvement in two wars, global warming, religious warfare, the dawn of smart phones.

4. The Numbers Game. I am not sure how the increase in the number of photographers is actually affecting photography production, but I am sure that it is.

On one hand, I can believe that to differentiate themselves, photographers are more than ever searching for new modes, new forms, new ground in order to claim space in the contemporary landscape.

On the other hand, I can equally believe photographers are scared by the numbers game into conservatism. To find acceptance and modest reward, I think a lot of photographers ape a type of work they’ve seen, ending with a formulaic conservatism to their visual ideas. This gives the impression of seeing the same project repeatedly, or seeing an image and being able to believe one of three dozen photographers could have produced it.

5. The Moat Theory. I believe part of why the art world sticks to medium and large format film has to do with keeping a barrier between themselves and the masses. How do you create a unique visional idea against the billions of digital images created every day, many of which will be more interesting than what any one single photographer can make? By not playing the game and keeping away from digital completely. Stay with equipment that’s more expensive and less convenient and therefore less used that produces a different “look” from the masses. The flip side to this is a lot of art photography is now using the same tools resulting in a similar look, even with a wider choice of potential tools.

This also, helpfully, allows us to produce larger prints that gallery’s can then theoretically make more money from, making us a more marketable commodity.

6. Problems of geographic diversity. Who’s your favorite Colombian photographer? Favorite Israeli? Favorite Egyptian? Favorite Brazilian...that's not named Salgado or Rio Branco? Ironically, in the digital era of information-sharing, there is far too little work being produced outside of the US and Europe being seen internationally. How many photo blogs focus on South America? On Africa? On South Asia?

Living in Colombia, I can say first-hand that it’s to a degree about volume and quality of production, but that the bigger problem is that what is being produced is not being distributed. The last true barrier in photography is geography.

Sadly, I also believe the aforementioned moat theory, to the degree that it's true, also has an unintended consequence. The line drawn between art photography and the digital masses also largely cuts off the international photography world who works digitally and in 35mm, resulting in a more homogenized photographic vision. Photographers from parts of the world beyond the US and Europe are frequently cut off from medium and large format as a possible mode of working by a lack of ability to purchase and use supplies. As a case study, I live in a Latin American city of over two million people and there is not one lab in the city for me to develop medium or large format film. I believe this results in work from these areas being seen by some - but absolutely not all - venues as less serious.

7. The Hustle. Photographers are being increasingly asked to pay for promotional materials by galleries, pay to publish our books, pay for portfolio reviews, pay for contests, pay for the chance to have someone look at our work, rent the gallery space...all of these expenditures may be making us more conservative in terms of what we produce, especially in combination with the idea of the limited number of guardians of the gates. Given how expensive photography is as a medium and how more and more expenses are being shifted to photographers from galleries and publishers, it makes sense to make your expenditures count by looking at present models of success and producing work you believe a gallery will be interested in showing or a publisher in publishing.

8. The Watered Down Theory. It’s possible that there is just as much imagery being created that is pushing against trends and creating visual progress, but that today we have to sift through so much material that it feels like stagnancy.

This is a starting point list of possible ideas; I'm sure that there is more to be added. This post has gotten long - I will cut this off here, but will make a summary post taking into account all three of these other posts hopefully later this week.

8.16.11 Reading Shortlist

The Reading Shortlist is an occasional post with a listing of recommended readings from other sites.

Gerry Badger, American Suburb X, Garry Winogrand: I Don't Give a Rap About Gasoline Stations - The Winogrand Problem (1988)

Rachel Been, Slideluck Potshow, Interview with Elinor Carucci

Paul Graham, The Unreasonable Apple

Lauren Henkin, Casual Consumption

Darius Himes, What Is a Document and What Is a Style?

Randy Kennedy, New York Times, When Life Gets in the Way of Art

Pedro Meyer, ZoneZero, Are Too Many People Taking Photographs?

Amy Stein, A Few Questions for Steven Ahlgren

f100: Owen Bruce, Tamar Latzman, Kathryn Parker Almanas, Dimitris Triantafyllou

© Owen Bruce

fototazo has asked a group of 50 curators, gallery owners, blog writers, photographers, academics and others actively engaged in photography to pick two photographers that deserve (more) recognition - the underknown, the under-respected as well as not-appreciated-enough favorites. A little more information on the project is available in the first post in the series here.

Today we continue the series with responses from Elinor Carucci and Pieter Wisse.

We began the series with responses from Nicholas Nixon, Matt Johnston, Blake Andrews, John Edwin Mason, Aline Smithson, Colin Pantall, Michael Werner, Liza Fetissova, Laurence Salzmann, Bryan Formhals, Richard Mosse, Shane Lavalette, Amy Stein, Amani Willett, Wayne Ford, S. Billie Mandle, Leslie K. Brown, Gordon Stettinius, Marc Feustel, Hin Chua, Adriana Rios Monsalve, Daniel Augschoell and Larissa Leclair.

Respondent: Elinor Carucci is an Israeli-American photographer. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and the NYFA Award in 2010. She was chosen by Photo District News as one of its "30 Under 30" in 2000 and won the International Center of Photography's "Infinity Award" for Best Young Photographer in 2001. She is currently working on a body of work about her children. Previous bodies of work include Closer which was published as a monograph in 2002 by Chronicle Books and republished in 2009 and  Diary of a Dancer which was published by SteidlMack in 2005. She was interviewed on fototazo in May here.

Selections: Owen Bruce and Tamar Latzman.

©  Tamar Latzman, Video Still from the series "View from a window (Sunset)", 2008

Respondent: Pieter Wisse runs 500 Photographers which will post the work of five active photographers a week for 100 weeks. The weblog, started April 5th, 2010, accompanies an edit of images by the selected photographer with a short biography and summary of the work. The goal of the project is to develop a single-source database of great photographers. Rotterdam-based Wisse is also the owner of Four Eyes Photography & Art, a gallery and bookstore that publishes Four Eyes Photography Magazine and that also recently published Wisse's own book, I Believe in 88.

Selections: Kathryn Parker Almanas and Dimitris Triantafyllou

Both photographers are very capable of looking at their deeper inner self and transforming it into solid, multi-layered and question-raising bodies of work.

Kathryn Parker Almanas is a wonderful example of taking a personal situation and using a creative and intelligent way to express oneself. Using food as a surrogate for the body, creating flesh and blood with dough and jellies, she has been making still-lives that raise questions about mortality and suffering for several years. Her consistent body of well-thought-out and well-executed projects, stemming from deep within herself, touch a universal anxiety for suffering and decay.

© Kathryn Parker Almanas, from the series "Dissector and Dissected"

Dimitris Triantafyllou takes his own feelings and questions and transforms them into photographic projects. Dimitris is a photographer on a quest of introspection and personal understanding. He looks at other people and other situations, and while documenting he knows he will eventually be looking at himself. Dimitris dares to dig deep into his own soul and use it to create a multi-layered body of work.

© Dimitris Triantafyllou, from the series "Identity"

Interview: Elinor Carucci

Interviewed by phone in New York City on May 4th, 2011

New York City-based Elinor Carucci (b 1971) is an Israeli-American photographer. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and the NYFA Award in 2010. She was chosen by Photo District News as one of its "30 Under 30" in 2000 and won the International Center of Photography’s "Infinity Award" for Best Young Photographer in 2001.

She is currently working on a body of work about her children. Previous bodies of work include Closer which was published as a monograph in 2002 by Chronicle Books and republished in 2009 with a forward from Susan Kismaric. A second book entitled Diary of a Dancer was published by SteidlMack in 2005. Her work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Jewish Museum (New York), the International Center of Photography, The Brooklyn Museum of Arts, The Houston Museum of Fine Arts, The Museum of Israeli Art in Ramat Gan, Israel, the Herzlia Museum of Contemporary Art and The Haifa Museum of Art.

In this interview, we have tried to add to the already extensive number of interviews with Carucci that exist online. Among the best of the many interviews are those with Rachel Been on Slideluck Potshow, the community interview with Matt Johnston on A Photo Student that features a selection of student questions and also two video interviews, one a film by Christian Klinger on amadelio and a second produced by artis in 2009. A Google search will turn up another dozen.

After reading through those interviews, we decided to focus this interview on areas of her life and work less covered previously: the role of Israeli culture in her work, questions about the images themselves that complement questions in previous interviews and also on her role as an educator.

THE ROLE OF ISRAELI CULTURE IN HER WORK

fototazo: Elinor, people often talk about your work in terms of intimacy, family and also your own life experience, but as I was looking through your images, it also seems to me your work is just as much about your culture. How much do you think your work is a reflection and commentary of being Israeli in terms of family dynamics, comfort with the body, parenting...

Elinor Carucci: Yes, when I started to take pictures, I didn't think about it at all, because I took for granted who I am, and who my family was, but especially after I moved to America, I realized that a lot of this is cultural. A lot of it is how, as you were just saying, how much more easier we are with nudity, and how intimacy is being expressed, especially among women in the Middle East. I realized that even though I wasn't intending to talk about Israeli culture, or Middle Eastern culture, my work ended up reflecting this culture because it's who I am and where I'm from.

f: Do you think you would be making the same images, or similar images, if you were still living in Israel full-time?

EC: Nope, no. I mean my work reflects my reality and today I have two children that were born and raised in America, they're Americans, and I'm photographing much more outside, so the New York streets [are] in my images, and also I'm a little different. So my life is different, and if my life is different, then my work is different.

f: Have you found a difference in how you're thought of as a photographer in Israel and in the US? And in the critical response you've received between the two countries?

EC: I think I have been better received in America. And I, even though I try to understand why it happened, I haven't figured it out...yet. Sixteen years here and I haven't figured it out! In America and in Europe my work gets a lot of attention, I have a lot of shows and good reviews, and in Israel it's been a struggle, I don’t know why.

f: Maybe it relates to the previous question about culture - that you have something to share in the U.S. and Europe that people are less familiar with that adds a charge to the work. Maybe in Israel, the world and life you show is something more common and the work is related to differently.

EC: I don't know. I mean I know that in Israel it's a smaller market, and the market is more conceptual. I definitely think some of it is trying to be seen as very sophisticated, and because we're a small country, maybe the art world wants to show that it's as good as America and Europe, and it's trying hard to be very conceptual, very sophisticated, and ends up being much colder.

It's coming from insecurity actually, so you see a lot of like, weird conceptual installations, and people think they're really cutting edge, and they will not accept work that has simplicity, and my work has...I don't know if it's simple, but it's straightforward. So it's seen less as like "fine art." But I'm trying not to give it a lot of thought, because it makes me angry.

QUESTIONS ON THE IMAGES

f: I would like to ask some questions about your work as well, starting with beauty, the body, and taking images. How important do you think your body and your beauty is to making images? Do you think you would be able to make, or be interested in making, the same images and statements with your work if you weren't so blessed?

EC: A. Thank you and B: My recent work, which you've just seen very little of on my website because I haven't showed it yet, I am not showing my body in a beautiful way at all - after pregnancy and the stretch marks and the sagging breasts, and all kinds of not really beautiful things. I think Closer was me in my twenties with a more beautiful body, but it's changing and my body's changing and I'm aging.

I mean, in my work, I'm trying to talk about many different things, and not all of it has to be beautiful, but, I have...and I don't think I'm beautiful at all, so...this question is funny to me! But I think the work is about the body and intimacy and the weaknesses and the flaws of the body, but I don’t know, I am who I am and the family that I am, so...

f: If you start with beauty, and then you show stretch marks and you show the passage of time, than maybe starting with beauty allows for tension in the images, that you see the change affecting beauty and that makes the images successful. Maybe if you started with a different body, showing damage wouldn't have the same tension and the same impact, the same success, perhaps, as an image.

EC: I don’t know. I'm trying to photograph my own experiences, but I think a lot of what I'm photographing is very universal and for every woman it's a painful process - with all the joy of having a baby - to lose the old body that you had. I think it's a painful process. For some it's not so bad and for some it's worse, and it also depends if you have twins, how your body is reacting to childbearing and pregnancy, but I think we all are beautiful when we are 18, and we're 30-something after pregnancy then birth. No matter what kind of body we started with, it's a difficult, painful process.

f: I also want to ask you about the history of your images and if you're strategies for, and ideas about, image-making have changed a lot over time.

EC: The more you learn and are exposed to more imagery and more artists, it's more absorbed in your life...I think I'm much more clear with what I want today with my work than I was twenty years ago, or fifteen years ago.

f: So that clarity has also been a process within your own work and looking at other people's work and living with your own images?

EC: No, I think the clarity comes from age and experience. I would have been more clear in what I think and what I want to say whether or not I'm an artist. Because I'm an artist it ends up in my work. I think when you're 40, and I'm almost 40, you are a different person than when you are 20 and 24. So I think I'm more opinionated today in many ways. I know what I think, I know what want, I know what I want to say.

f: Has becoming clearer in thoughts and ideas with age changed the images formally?

EC: I see the changes as I look at my work in retrospect. I see changes that happen as a result...even light, there's not much in the Manhattan apartments in New York, so I started using a lot of artificial light. I am more indoors here because the winter. I think I came to loosen the work up, it used to be much more controlled, and now I try to give more room for things to just happen. And also, you know, the point of view. I'm a mom, I'm a mother of two, I've immigrated from one country to another, which can be a very painful experience, and a very complicated one. So it's a combination I guess of many different things that I'm not even aware of at the time.

f: I was reading in an interview with you that with time you've accepted staging images more, and become comfortable with the truth and the kind of the reality that that can show. Have you ever felt that if you're going to stage the images, you might look at making medium or large format images? Why have you decided to stay with 35mm?

EC: I know that was written, but it was a little...I guess people misunderstood me, I don't really stage images. I sometimes maybe arrange them more...so also maybe it's my lack of better English.

f: Well, we can correct the record in this interview!

EC: [laughs] I never stage an image completely, but I'll sometimes just slightly interfere with the situation or bring a light, but the images are not staged, they're not staged. And I need to be able to hold a camera and hold the baby in the other hand and so the quickness and the lightness of the 35mm was good for me, even though some of my work was done with a 4x5 camera, and today I'm using the MarkIII which is not really 35, it's heavier.

But to work exclusively with 4x5 I couldn’t do it because many of the images that are happening in the moment while I'm in the moment, I need the immediacy of the 35.

f: You talked in one interview about Mary Ellen Mark being a strong, early photographic influence. I wanted to ask you about what influence film, music, literature or other creative sources have had on your work.

EC: I'm mostly, I guess, aware of photography, but also I think that film directors have influence on me, but it’s hard to connect it directly to my work, but there's people whose work I just love. Doug Lerman, the film director, and Matilde Matilde, and the Israeli director, Ari Feldmen, just people whose work really touched me...and maybe influenced me somehow.

f: And this is a straightforward question: why do you take pictures?

EC: Yes, I don't know. I mean, I don't know why. It's this thing that makes me feel so alive. You know, I can tell you what it makes me feel, but I don't know why photography I guess. It's like asking a woman why you fell in love with this man. It's this very mysterious thing. I love taking pictures, it helps me see my life and see the world around me and it just makes me feel...alive as I said, but I don't really know why photography and not painting or sculpture or...or working as a financial consultant. I don't know. It's just what I love to do.

f: Do you ever have an interest in or kind of a fantasy of being another type of photographer? Do you look at images by certain people and wish you were the photographer that could take those?

EC: I love what I do and I think wishing for doing other things is really fulfilled by shooting a lot on assignment. I shoot for magazines and I've been doing so for the last decade. So I'm [exposed to] many different assignments and different kinds of people. It does fulfill the need to do other things and be inspired by other ideas - and great photo editors push me out of my comfort zone.

TEACHING AND ADVICE

f: I would like to ask you about your role as a teacher. How do your roles as a photographer and educator interact and overlap, what do you get from teaching and also what does it make you give up?

EC: I don't sacrifice anything because I'm not a full-time teacher. I think some of the problems of teaching are the fact that it takes so much of someone's time. I just teach once a week right now and I give workshops every once in a while...so it's not like I devote myself to teaching.

I think the downside of that is that I don't have a full-time position, I don't make income I can rely on from teaching because I'm an adjunct professor. The great thing for me...[is] that it forces me to get out of my work and myself and really think about my students, how they think and how they create. For me this is the challenge. Every time I see someone's work, I don't really know at first what needs to be done in order to help them progress. It's a process. In this process I have to realize who they are and how they think and how they create, and then to try to help them that way, and for me this is the biggest challenge.

f: I thought we could ask a few questions about the general advice you give your students while talking about your role as a teacher. Do you have advice received or learned over the course of your career that you would pass along to them?

EC: Someone once advised me to really go with what I think in terms of editing my work, and what kind of work I'm doing and then, he said, it will be easier to embrace your failures. And this is so true because there are a lot of failures along the way, when you choose to be an artist, photographer, creative person. And to me if you know that you are walking your way, what you do reflects who you are, then if you fail, it's easier to deal with it than if you're trying to chase some kind of idea or trend of what kind of work you should be doing. I think it was a good advice. To just - not "just" because it's not an easy thing - to be me and take the decisions that are right for me.

f: Do you have any advice on starting projects?

EC: Yeah, they should do whatever they feel is right to do. I mean, you can always look at the trends. I don't work this way, some people do and that's fine for them, and sometimes, you know, seeing what has been done around you and trying different things is not a bad thing - but I've given advice because it's a very personal thing.

f: What about on the other end of a project, thinking about how to put these images, that come from different times, different places together, do you have any thoughts about sequences and creating a larger body or work, any thoughts to pass on?

EC: No, I feel it really depends on the work, on the context, on where it is going, and if it's a group show, if it's a book, if it's a page or two pages or eight pages for a magazine, if you want your work to be read as a narrative or not, as a conceptual project or not, so it's not something that generally you can I think you can have one advice for.

f: Do you think that a photograph can tell a narrative?

EC: Yeah, I think it can tell a narrative. I don't know if it can reflect reality as it is, but it can tell a narrative, it can be a narrative that is from the photographer's mind, but it can tell a narrative.

f: Do you have any thoughts about the gallery-museum world and strategies for having successful relationships with them?

EC: I think my only advice is to be really flexible and not to be entitled. Galleries are struggling almost the way we do, you know, you have to take it one step at a time. So I think if you're selling a lot, or if you just got a lot of critical attention, then you can ask for more from the gallery, but you can't ask the gallery to be your parent, you have to be realistic in the fact that these are businesses, they need to make a living, they need to pay the bills, you have to be realistic in what you ask from them. So for me to be flexible and realistic, and not be kind of the whining artist that I sometimes was, that I wish I'd learned earlier on.

f: The last question is to ask you if there's anything you would like to add or to see if there's something you've always wished an interviewer would ask you.

EC: No, I've been asked I think everything!

f: I was surprised how many interviews there are with you online. Hopefully the interview will add a little bit to the existing content about you as a teacher, a little bit more about the role of culture in your work and a little information about images themselves to complement what's out there.

Thanks, Elinor, for your time!

Edited for length, sequence, and clarity.

Elinor Carucci on Portraiture

Untitled, 2001. Tierney Gearon

fototazo has asked twelve photographers what makes a good portrait. This is the 2nd in the series of their responses. The first was Mark Powell.

Born in Jerusalem, Elinor Carucci moved to New York in 1995. She was quickly included in an impressive number of solo and group exhibitions, including a solo show at the Gagosian Gallery and a group show at the Musuem of Modern Art. Her photographs are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, among others. She was awarded the International Center for Photography's Infinity Award for Young Photographers in 2001 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. She has published two monographs, Closer, which was recently republished with a new forward by Susan Kismaric, and Diary of a Dancer. Her work can be explored here.

Elinor Carucci: A good portrait for me is one that evokes a response of some sort to the person being photographed which allows a deeper look into who this person is. I know that for me it is usually an emotional response that tempts me into the images, feelings draw me in and make me remember the image, the person, or the story, and make me go back to the image again and again.

I attached a portrait that was taken by Tierney Gearon of her mother because I can really get a sense of her mother, something about the stress of the hands, the tension of the mouth sucking the cigarette, but with her gaze far away...the contrast between these elements make this portrait complex and moving. It sends me to my own fears and anxieties, to the women that are important in my life, and how I look at them; I feel connected to this image and through it to my own life.