ONLINE DOSSIER: ELINOR CARUCCI

Session 1.  Photographing Your Own Life; Bringing Your Work into Your Personal Sphere (April 8)

Even in normal times, many artists find that their best work is inspired by their personal spaces. By photographing the people and places with whom they are intimately acquainted, they are able to communicate a more profound level of understanding of both personal and universal subjects.   

In this session, Carucci talks about her personal work and about ways of finding and addressing different themes in the microcosm of our own little personal universe. She addresses ways of applying this method of working and how it can be expanded to include many aspects, subjects and aesthetics, to encourage new and continuation of the participants’ projects.

icp: Photography from Isolation to Communication (April 8,9,10).

01:04

»Photographing your own life is not like experiencing or seeing your own life. There is something about pulling out the camera and looking at a different kind of way that makes everything around us a source of materials to work with. We are surrounded by our culture, family, who we are. These days we are very limited.«

02:57

»When you photograph the people around you, some of them you might not be able to photograph then because they want to agree to be photographed but then there are different levels of how much they will allow you to get in, from the physical to the emotional. So different levels of collaboration. […] I had to learn the limits of each person and also how to beg or try and try again and explain. […] Who they are is who their personality is, how much they are willing to open up, how do we navigate between the selfish needs that we have as artists, as visual people and who the people we love are. Where the balance between exploiting […] and collaboration.«

08:24

»Every experience we have […] is changing the way that we take the materials from our lives. […] I had to deal with creating work in a crisis situation […] I was like “I won’t be able to take pictures of this”, so a few things happened. First of all, because we lost our other way of communicating […] photography kind of became a way of communication.«

11:40

»I think we sometimes photograph our lives in order to understand our own lives. I many times feel that until I photograph certain things in my life I don’t see them, I don’t really understand them.«

17:49

»I think there is something about photography your own life that can be enhanced and can be extended by hearing other people’s stories. […] Some of what you hear can be brought into your own work that your creating from your own life.«