Diary of a Dancer
Elinor Carucci
steidlMACK
English
Edited by Michael Mack
Hardcover
96 pages
295 x 201 mm
2005
ISBN 3865211550
Diary of a Dancer, Carucci’s second book, portrays her years as a professional Middle Eastern (belly) dancer. Over three years, she photographed her experiences at events throughout New York City and its surrounding areas, capturing the dual lives of a performer—the carefully constructed public persona and the quieter, unguarded moments offstage.
Using a panoramic Russian film camera (HORIZON), this series went in a cinematic direction. Whether backstage applying makeup or engaging with diverse audiences, she navigates themes of identity, self-presentation, and the emotional labor of performance. This series expands her ongoing investigation into the personal as public, and the body as both expressive and vulnerable.
“But this too was not all the attraction of this work for me. What drew me so powerfully to those places would not be sufficiently explained without the rare, strange, skewed, yet penetrating way this work allowed me to peek into other people’s lives. So curiosity and voyeurism have much to do with all this. Perhaps, I should add, there is also the marveling at how natural plain empathy could be, how it can sometimes, if not always, easily extend from curiosity. These occasions were usually happy events, and it is surprisingly simple how, in a 30-minute glimpse – a wedding, a child’s birthday, or a celebration of reunion – emotions are contagious. You actually feel the sheer joys of other people, sometimes even recognize their hidden pains or their bitterness. It is not so much the content of the emotions but the facility of sharing them, however briefly, that endlessly fascinated me.”
(Source: https://elinorcarucci.com/diaryofadancer.html)
About the Artist
Born 1971 in Jerusalem, Israel, to a Mizrahi Jewish family of North African, Bukharan and Italian descent, Elinor Carucci graduated in 1995 from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design with a degree in photography, and moved to New York that same year. Her work has been included in many solo and group exhibitions worldwide, solo shows include The Jewish Museum, Edwynn Houk gallery, Fifty One Fine Art Gallery, James Hyman and Gagosian Gallery, London among others and group show 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 of Art, Houston Museum of Fine Art, among others, and her work 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 Infinity Award for Young Photographer in 2001, The Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and NYFA in 2010. Carucci has published five monographs to date, Closer, Chronicle Books 2002, Diary of a dancer, SteidlMack 2005, MOTHER, Prestel 2013, Midlife, Monacelli Press 2019, and The Collars of RBG, Clarkson Potter Random House, 2023.
Carucci teaches at Hunter College and at the graduate program of Photography and Related Media at School of Visual Arts and is represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery and Atrbute agency.
https://www.elinorcarucci.com/
(Source: https://www.elinorcarucci.com/bio.html)
About the Publisher
Steidl is one of the few remaining publishing houses to be independently operated by its founding owner, and to control every step of the manufacturing process — the editing, design, typography, scanning, marketing, distribution, public relations and printing. There are only 35 employees working at Steidl’s head office in Göttingen.
What began as a backyard enterprise has evolved into one of the world’s most sophisticated and distinguished printing and publishing companies. The unique quality of his photography book production has brought Steidl to the attention of acclaimed photographers, artists and designers and he works for many renowned museums and galleries like The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, the Architectural Association, London, and National Portrait Gallery, London, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Steidl also designs and prints for Chanel, Fendi, the Lagerfeld Gallery, for Elizabeth Arden, and Yohji Yamamoto, and produces high-class photography books for Thames & Hudson, Scalo and Schirmer and Mosel.
https://www.steidlville.com/
(Source: https://www.steidlville.com/aboutus/)
