Hair Dye 2016 ©Elinor Carlucci Courtesy of Monacelli Press

When I saw the cover of Midlife by Elinor Carlucci (Monacelli Press), I was expecting a Kinfolk-esque display of women in their forties and fifties looking fabulous with amethyst necklaces and proudly touting freshly greyed roots. What I got was refreshingly not that. This became apparent when I opened the stunning volume to the photo, Hair Dye, 2016, featuring Carucci herself against a black background, highly pigmented brown dye coating her hair and the top of her forehead, fiercely looking us right in the eyes.

Red #1 2014 ©Elinor Carlucci Courtesy of Monacelli Press

In Kristen Roupenian’s forward she wrote, “But what is true is that signs of aging, in women, are treated as though they ought to be invisible, which makes the subject a natural one for a photographer as drawn to the disconcerting close-up as Elinor Carucci.” Hair Dye is a photo that demands visibility and it sets the stage for a series of intimate, truthful photographs ultimately tracking Carucci’s midlife.

Eran And I 2013 ©Elinor Carlucci Courtesy of Monacelli Press

Carucci expertly weaves photographs of her family, photographs of herself, close-ups of objects like pills or a dead baby bird, and what we later find out to be paintings made with the artist’s own blood. In Midlife we meet Carucci’s two children, her parents, her brother, and her husband, Eran. The element of drama Carucci invites into photos like Kiss Trace, 2015 and You Know More of the Parenting Falls To Me, 2017 aestheticizes familiar familial tropes to tell a story of the triumphs and challenges of life and love. I could relate and also not relate just enough so that the artist showed us something recognizable but at the same time, entirely her own. To me, the photos monumentalize something that, if we’re lucky enough to have, we usually take for granted. That is, family, intimacy, the process of aging, even those seemingly mundane routines like putting away the groceries which Carucci manages to make tender and beautiful.

Kiss Trace 2015 ©Elinor Carlucci Courtesy of Monacelli Press

Another favorite of mine is Reading Glasses, 2015 in which Carucci holds her breast up and gets a close look at her nipple with her reading glasses on, to pluck at some stubborn hairs. This is printed next to another of Eran titled, Just Woke Up, Give Him A Minute, 2018, a portrait that allows us into a highly personal moment. Somehow even more so than that which the artist captured in After Sex, 2019. The proximity Carucci permits us feels almost undeserved and the elegance with which she carries it all out is a feat to be reckoned with.

Curlers 2013 ©Elinor Carlucci Courtesy of Monacelli Press

A throughline in Midlife is generational succession. Carucci frequently shows us images like her mother and her daughter holding hands, or herself out of focus, standing behind her father. She closes the monograph with a blood painting but just before that is Three Generations, 2016. We see Carucci, her daughter, and her mother, each lying on another, stacked on a red couch. Midlife follows a career of similarly profound work but here with more love, more wisdom, and more life. And still, as Carucci writes in the afterword, “I am only midway through.”