Midlife: Photographs by Elinor Carucci, Hardcover

From acclaimed photographer Elinor Carucci, a vivid chronicle of one woman's passage through aging, family, illness, and intimacy.

It is a period in life that is universal, at some point, to everyone, yet in our day-to-day and cultural dialogue, nearly invisible. Midlife is a moving and empathetic portrait of an artist at the point in her life when inexorable change is more apparent than ever. Elinor Carucci, whose work has been collected in the previous acclaimed volumes Closer (2002, 2009) and Mother (2013), continues her immersive and close-up examination of her own life in this volume, portraying this moment in vibrant detail.

As one of the most autobiographically rigorous photographers of her generation, Carucci recruits and revisits the same members of her family that we have seen since her work gained prominence two decades ago. Even as we observe telling details--graying hair, the pressures and joys of marriage, episodes of pronounced illness, the evolution of her aging parents' roles as grandparents, her children's increasing independence--we are invited to reflect on the experiences that we all share contending with the challenges of life, love, and change.

Elinor Carucci's photographs have been included in numerous exhibitions worldwide, including in solo shows at Edwynn Houk Gallery, Fifty One Fine Art Photography Gallery, Fotomuseum Antwerp, and Gagosian Gallery, London, among others, and in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art, MoCP Chicago, and the Photographers' Gallery, London. She has contributed to The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Details, Wired, Men's Health, New York, W, People, Aperture, ARTnews, and numerous other publications. Her photographs are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the International Center of Photography, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Haifa Museum of Art. Carucci was awarded the ICP Infinity Award in 2001, the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, and was named the NYFA Fellow in Photography in 2010. This is her fourth monograph, after Closer (Chronicle, 2002/2009), Diary of a Dancer (SteidlMack, 2005), and Mother (Prestel, 2013). Carucci teaches at the graduate program of Photography and Related Media at School of Visual Arts and is represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York and Fifty One Fine Art Photography Gallery, Belgium.
Kristen Roupenian graduated from Barnard College and holds a PhD in English from Harvard, as well as an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan. She is the author of the short story, "Cat Person," which was published in The New Yorker and selected by Sheila Heti for The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018. Her best-selling debut collection, You Know You Want This, has been translated into more than twenty languages. She is currently at work on a novel.