Elinor Carucci gives a formal slant to diaristic photography. Her subject is herself and her family; the focus is narrow; there is little sense of what might be on the other side of the wall, outside the frame. Yet the images are not claustrophobic. Nor are they ever raw or chaotic. Instead, they are almost classically composed. In an interview, the New York-based Israeli photographer has said that at the beginning of her career, she "was worried about staged work. I was trying to make everything like a snapshot, very spontaneous, because I wanted it to be true, to be honest. I then realized I'm never spontaneous because I'm photographing myself, so I'm always posing, always aware, always staged." The photograph becomes a medium in which the subject (including the autobiographical subject) deploys a rhetoric of gestures whose confessionalism and artifice are inseperable...
Read the complete review in Artforum.
Image: Elinor Carucci, Pain #8 (2003), color photograph